


Cantilever

by orphan_account



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: All Ways, Always, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic-ish, Crying, Gunshot Wounds, Lawyers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-05-18 05:42:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 29,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14846870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Ten months after the events of "Undiscovered Country," Carisi and Rollins are working a case on the East Side when they encounter an unrelated crime and an unexpected victim: former ADA Rafael Barba.(He lives. Don't worry. He lives. Keep reading. ;-))This one's weird, probably.





	1. Chapter 1

In the two weeks before Thanksgiving, Manhattan SVU had received three reports of a middle-aged woman attempting to wrestle baby strollers away from young mothers who were out with their infants after 10PM. All three attempts had happened on the East Side, midtown; all three involved mothers who worked late and were walking their infants home from a babysitter or a family daycare.

When the fourth woman, Roya Ibragimova — a 24-year-old who lived in Queens, worked on the East Side, and walked her one-year-old daughter over the Queensborough Bridge in an umbrella stroller two nights a week because she couldn’t afford express bus fare — came into the squad room, Lieutenant Benson said they had to prioritize catching the suspect, because she was either going to succeed, or she was going to escalate. 

Roya said that the woman, who was likely pushing sixty, had followed and taunted her a few times before, warning her that she shouldn’t be walking over the bridge with the baby so late at night. A few days after Thanksgiving, she’d knocked into Roya and grabbed onto both stroller handles. Roya had to kick her in the shin to keep her from walking away with the stroller, and with Sarah, the one-year-old inside it. 

On a below-freezing night in December, Roya pushed an empty stroller towards the Queensborough Bridge’s pedestrian entrance. Sarah was staying with a neighbor in Rego Park, and Rollins and Carisi lurked near the surrounding buildings. By 10:30, the suspect hadn’t shown up, so Rollins and Carisi sent Roya home in a squad car with officers who were heading to Queens. “We’re on this,” Carisi promised her. “We’re going to bring you in for identification as soon as we find her.”

“She probably figured Roya would have NYPD on her tonight,” Carisi said as he and Rollins walked back to the car.

“We’ll have to send a UC out here with a baby carriage.”

“You could do it.”

“You know I’m around 15 years older than all four victims, right?”

“I do not have a safe response to that,” Carisi joked, looking straight ahead.

Just as Rollins elbowed him, gunshots rang out somewhere east of them, towards the FDR Drive.

Four gunshots, maybe five, but maybe one of them was the sound of a tire exploding. The cold air amplified everything. Rollins radioed in a report of shots fired.

“Come on,” Carisi said, and they ran towards York Avenue, where they found a car stopped on the grass in a small, half-block city park under the bridge.

They were first on the scene.

Carisi drew his weapon and moved in closer as Rollins secured the perimeter in the dark.

Blue Civic. Probably blue, but there was very little light above and behind them. Carisi removed one hand from his weapon and stuck his flashlight between his teeth so he could get a better look at the scene. Front passenger side tire blown out. Both front windows blown out too. The man in the passenger seat was unconscious, and his face looked like it had been grazed by a bullet. The driver, meanwhile, had caught a bullet straight through his forehead. The rear passenger side door was open, and a third passenger lay sprawled across the backseat, a gunshot wound to his abdomen. 

“Amanda.” Carisi’s voice was shaking. “Amanda!”

Rollins was busy holding the perimeter and radioing an ambulance.

The man in the backseat was Rafael Barba.

“NYPD,” Carisi said for the benefit of the man in the passenger seat, in case he’d regained consciousness. Then, “Rafael. Help is coming. Stay awake for me.”

Barba’s eyes were wide, pleading, terrified. Carisi could see that he was unable to speak, to vocalize a single sound. He leaned in closer. There wasn’t a lot of blood, not like some of the other injuries Carisi had seen in his career, and he knew that an abdominal wound without a lot of blood wasn’t a good sign. 

“Officer, I’m all right,” the man in the front seat said. “Bullet grazed my face, so I … I played dead until they left. Raf, tell me you’re okay. Rafael?”

“Listen,” Carisi said, “I need you to stay where you are, don’t turn around, don’t move until the paramedics get here, in case you’re hurt worse than you think you are. What’s your name?”

“Andy Carvalho. I’m a partner in a law firm in Albany. Rafael has been working for me since February. Rafael! Please tell me you’re all right!”

“Who’s the driver?”

“Rideshare. I don’t remember his name. It’s on my phone, wherever my phone is. Please tell me Raf’s okay back there.”

“He’ll be fine. We’ve got help coming.”

Barba’s eyes widened. Carisi offered him his hand. Barba squeezed, with surprising strength. 

Carisi heard sirens behind him. Two ambulances and at least three police cars pulled up. He cleared out of the way while the paramedics tended to the two living victims.

For only the second time in his eighteen-year career with the NYPD, Carisi had to duck behind a tree and throw up in the grass. 

“Carisi!” Rollins shouted suddenly. “EMTs, your bus, your bus!”

He turned to see what appeared to be — unless he was hallucinating, a remote but distinct possibility given what he’d just seen — a woman decked out for a Friday night in midtown Manhattan, heels and hair five inches tall, throw open an ambulance door and drive away. One of the paramedics let out a loud gasp and held up her keys. “How —“

Rollins had already started after the ambulance on foot when two officers jumped into their car.

“They told us to carry our keys with us ever since that paramedic in the Bronx got killed,” the EMT said.

“What did she do then, she hotwired an ambulance in two minutes?” Carisi said. “What the hell are we looking at here?”

A homicide detective on the scene shrugged. “Never seen anything like —“

They heard gunfire again, the sound of a tire blowing out, and Rollins screaming a thousand curses in the distance.

“The guy in the backseat’s more emergent,” Carisi heard the paramedic say. “He’s priority. Get him to Mercy. We’ll radio for another bus for the one with the superficial wound.”

Carisi ran a few blocks north to catch up with his partner. The officers who’d followed in their car were arresting the woman who’d stolen the ambulance, and Rollins was sitting on the sidewalk, cradling her right hand in her left.

He sat with her, cross-legged, on the sidewalk. Her hand was swollen to three times its normal size and her fingers were crooked. “Damn it,” she said, wincing.

“You got her.”

“I shot out the tire. You can’t have somebody driving around in New York City in a stolen ambulance this close to the UN, that’s all I was thinking. You can’t have somebody driving around in New York City in a stolen ambulance, ever. She ran, I went to tackle her and she stomped on my right hand like she knew what she was doing.”

“But you got her.”

“Whatever this means for my career,” she said, holding up her hand. 

Carisi helped her to her feet. “I’ll take you to Mercy.”

“That’s where they’re taking Barba?”

Carisi nodded. “It’s homicide’s case, so no need for us to stay on the scene. I’ll give the lead detective our contact information.”

“Fuck,” Rollins moaned, wincing again.

“It’s bad?”

“I was just thinking about Liv. This is going to destroy her.”

— 

3AM phone calls had been a constant in Olivia Benson’s life for the last ten years. They annoyed her, but they never alarmed her.

She reached for the smartphone on her night table and opened one eye. “Good morning, Fin,” she said.

“Liv.”

He’d said nothing other than her name. Something was wrong.

“What happened?”

“Turn on the lights, take a deep breath.”

Something was very wrong. They must have lost an officer.

“Who?” she asked, turning on her bedside lamp.

“Barba.”

“Barba?” The name caught in her throat. “What —“

“Rollins and Carisi were trying to catch our First Avenue baby snatcher, no luck with that yet, they heard gunshots, and they found Barba, a partner at his firm, and their rideshare driver near the Queensborough Bridge. Last Carisi told me, he’s in emergency surgery at Mercy.”

She covered her mouth with her hand. Behind her ears, she could feel her heart racing. “Any word on the prognosis?”

“Nothing yet. We’ve got a situation with Rollins, too, shattered a bone in her hand. I can stay here on OT if you want to go to Mercy when Lucy gets there.”

“You’re lying to me about “nothing yet,” for the same reason you lied about why you wanted to stay in SVU. I appreciate it, I do, but tell me what you know.”

“Barba took a bullet to the spleen. It’s not good.”

She pursed her lips, shook her head, and blinked back tears that she didn’t want to cry over Rafael Barba. 

He’d tried to get in touch with her In May, after she’d had to get herself out of yet another hostage situation. She’d let the call go to voicemail.

_Liv, I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. Like I told you, after what I’d done, I had to move on, I had to —_

She’d immediately pressed “delete” at that point in the message.

Rafael Barba knew how to break her heart, always. There were so many times in the three months after he’d left that she’d needed him there, as a friend, as an ADA, and she’d had no idea where he was, because he’d had to move on. She knew how hard that trial had been on him, she knew he believed his decision to flip the switch had been a mistake, that he had no place interfering in a dispute that only family and doctors had any place interfering in. She knew Stone had broken him when he had him up there on the stand. But still, he could have stayed, they could have supported each other as they made their way out of their personal purgatories, they could have, in some other timeline maybe, they could have been in love. 

She hung her head and large, messy tears fell from her eyes as she sobbed silently, alone in her bedroom full of shadows cast by the old lamp on her bedside table. After a minute or two, she pulled herself out of the wave of grief — against the current, always — and called Carisi to check in on Rollins. 

In some other timeline, Barba would have stayed. In this one, Benson didn’t know if he’d make it through the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this one: I started this before "Comeback" but the plot was so convoluted that I couldn't figure out what to do with it. I've decided in my (complete lack of) spare time to make it happen.
> 
> Barson eventually. If you read this, I owe you a cute, happy Barson scene from the "Comeback" universe where, like, nothing terrible's happened to them for two years.
> 
> Remind me that I'm not allowed to catch feelings about fictional characters anymore.


	2. Chapter 2

First, he was running the bases at a Little League game, and the coach — who he didn’t recognize, but who was strangely familiar to him nevertheless — was screaming at him. Curses, slurs, insults, and every time he reached home plate, struggling for air, the coach shouted at him to keep running. The problem was, he was a 48-year-old man, he couldn’t breathe, and he had a full package of sharpened #2 pencils shoved into one of his tonsils, sticking out of his throat. But, he kept running until the sun began to set, casting a light on his mother, sitting on a park bench in the outfield, crying. 

He ran over to her and sat down, a terrible pressure near his ribs all of a sudden. “It’s okay, Mami,” he said, putting an arm around Lucia, “it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s over, it’s been over for a long time.” She didn’t stop crying. She wouldn’t look up at him.

Over his head he saw a round white light, but he knew that couldn’t have been death coming for him, because after what he’d done — to the Householders, to Olivia, to everyone’s hearts he’d broken during that trial — there was no way that death was coming for him directly from above. There was no way that he didn’t have a long purgatorial climb ahead of him first. 

When the light faded, he was laying flat on the floor in Olivia Benson’s bedroom. He heard muffled sobs above his head. The full package of #2 pencils was still sticking out of his throat. He managed, somehow, to get up onto the bed. 

He’d never seen her cry like this, not Liv, not even when she’d briefly collapsed in his arms, terrified, after Noah was kidnapped. “Liv, sweetheart,” he said, stroking her hair, “sweetheart, sweetheart, I’m here.” 

With the sound of a door slamming, everything around him went dark, as if the world had been shut off. 

—-

At 3:30 in the morning, Benson texted Lucy with the promise of double pay and two weekdays off if she got to her place as early as she could on Saturday morning. _NP, everything ok?_ Lucy texted back five minutes later. Thank God for people who never shut their phones off.

Lucy showed up at 5. Benson hugged her as soon as she came through the door. “I owe you everything,” she said. “I’ll pay for the rest of your master’s program if you can help out with Jesse Rollins later. too. I’m only half kidding.”

“Something happened with Detective Rollins?”

“She may need surgery on her hand. Nothing extremely serious, but it’s a bad injury for a police detective who needs to be able to draw a weapon.”

“Call me later, let me know what you need.”

“You are a godsend. And … Rafael Barba is at Mercy Hospital too. Gunshot wound to the spleen. Not looking good.”

Lucy’s face fell. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, it’s — I have to check in with Rollins, mostly.” 

“Don’t worry about it,” Lucy said. 

At Mercy half an hour later, she was directed to the ICU waiting room, where she found Lucia Barba slumped over in a chair with her head in both hands.

“Mrs. Barba?”

Lucia looked up quickly. Her eyes were bloodshot, sunken in to the dark pockets around them. “What happened?” she asked hoarsely.

“I don’t know,” Benson answered, shaking her head, fighting back tears yet again. “I don’t know. This isn’t an SVU case. Has anyone come to —“

“No. It’s just been me in here alone, no detectives or anybody, just — just doctors, and they said he’s got a high risk of infection, if he gets an infection in the next couple of days it’ll — it’ll kill him. I’m his next of kin, I’m the only one allowed in there until tomorrow, they said, and I don’t —“ She stopped to swallow. Her hands were shaking. “I can’t look at him like _that_ , whatever kind of mother that makes me, I can’t look at him like _that_ , because —“

“Because he’s intubated,” Benson said.

“Mm-hmm,” was all Lucia could force out. 

“Okay.” She took both of Lucia’s hands and clasped them between her own. Why, she wondered, hadn’t the detectives been in to see the victim’s mother? She hoped they were following other leads, at the very least. “Okay,” she repeated, holding Lucia’s hands tighter.

“They took out his spleen and a foot of his intestines, that’s what they said. He’s in a medical coma for the next three days so his body can rest. If he gets an infection before then, that’s it. And —“

Her whole body was trembling, so Benson put an arm around her to steady her. 

“He loves you so much,” Lucia said, “he does.”

“I know.” That was a half-truth to comfort a terrified mother.

“But he loved his job too. He threw it all away for this?”

“Do you know what he was doing up in Albany, Mrs. Barba?”

“Please, call me Lucia. “Mrs. Barba” was a horrible person, God forgive me. Rafael didn’t tell you, during the trial? Andy Carvalho, they were good friends back at Harvard, he offered him a job.”

“He told me nothing.”

“How did he leave it with you?”

“He said I changed his life, he said I made him see the world in color instead of black and white, he kissed me on the forehead and said he had to move on.”

“ _Mijo_. I’m going to smack him upside the head when he wakes up.” She smiled sadly in Benson’s direction. “He broke your heart, didn’t he? Rafi,” she said to the closed ICU door, “Rafi, you never learn.”

— 

“Hey. Hey, Mr. Carvalho, can I talk to you a second?”

Andy Carvalho rubbed his forehead and sank into a hospital waiting room chair. The side of his head was bandaged where the bullet had grazed him. “Not today, detective, please, no more.”

Carisi was still in the gray pants and vest he’d worn all day Friday, his tie discarded somewhere in the hospital and his sleeves rolled up past his elbows. “All right. You, uh, need a ride or anything?”

“My ex-wife is driving down to pick me up.”

“You should stay in the city in case homicide has any more questions.”

“I’ve already told the NYPD everything that happened.”

“I figured —“

“Not your case, Detective. Not your business.”

“I see why you and Barba are friends,” Carisi said, sitting in the chair opposite Carvalho’s.

“We’re friends because we had to deal with all the same crap in Cambridge, in the Bronx, in Newark. Okay? Enough.” He leaned forward. “It’s on me if Rafael dies. I know that already. I’m the one who told him to come work for me, I’m the one who thought he should work for me as a defense attorney while he got his life back together after the trial.”

Carisi shifted in his seat. “Can you at least help me understand how you ended up being fired at in a car under the bridge on a Friday night?”

“Are you nervous, or are you too tall to comfortably sit in a chair?”

“I’m a lawyer, too. Passed the bar a few years ago. Rafael Barba’s like a mentor to me. He’s my unwitting mentor and I’m the student he never wanted.”

“You were sleeping with him?” Carvalho asked.

“No.”

“ _Can you at least help me understand_? I’m a defense attorney, a senior partner, do you know how many interrogations I’ve sat through where a cop looks at a suspect all concerned-like and says _can you at least help me understand_? I see through your bullshit.”

Carisi stood up. “I’m sorry, Mr. Carvalho.”

“Detective,” Carvalho said, slowly rising to his feet again and reaching for his wallet in the clear plastic bag that held his belongings. He took out a business card and handed it to Carisi. “Call me if anything changes with Rafael’s condition.”

“Yeah. I will.” He tucked Carvalho’s card into his shirt pocket as he headed towards the elevators.

—-

Benson saw Carisi as she was on her way out of the ICU waiting room, on her way to check up on Rollins, who’d been in the ER downstairs all night. “You just missed Mrs. Barba,” she said. “She went to get something to eat. Any word from homicide on what the hell happened last night?”

“Nope. Carvalho’s pretty tight-lipped about it too. Are we allowed to go see Barba?”

“Not until tomorrow. If he gets an infection so soon after having his spleen removed, that’s it. They’re keeping him under for another few days anyway.”

Carisi closed his eyes. “What was he doing? With that law firm, in the car, in the park under the bridge, what was he _doing_?”

“I think,” Benson said, making a fist and pressing her clenched hand to the wall, “that trial screwed him up, broke him down a little bit.”

“I’m with you, Lieu.”

“How’s Rollins? I was going to head down to the ER.”

“She’s in surgery. Jesse’s with her neighbor. They couldn’t let Rollins go home because she had bone fragments in her hand, so she had to wait down there all night for the orthopedic surgeon to come in. They have to put a pin in her hand to hold the bone steady. She’s got a couple broken fingers, too.”

“I told Lucy we may need her to watch Jesse.”

“Rollins said her mom will come up in a couple days.”

Benson took a breath. “All right, then, I’ve got to get back to the squad room.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“When was the last time you slept?”

“I don’t know. Thursday night, I guess.”

“Carisi.”

Carisi’s phone chimed, and he did, indeed, yawn while he read the message on the screen. “I’m going to the precinct with you. Our First Avenue baby snatcher’s son just brought her in.”

“Wow.” Benson pressed the elevator button and waited. 

“The son’s a lawyer.”

“Great,” she said sarcastically. 

“I, uh, know this must be rough on you, but —“ He reached out to touch her arm. “But you and I, we both know that Barba’s gonna pull through this, because he’s too much of a stubborn asshole to let himself die of a gunshot wound.”

“What a thing to say.” She was half-smiling, but her voice shook on every word. She wiggled her fingers, inviting Carisi into a hug, which he accepted. “I hope you’re right. I really hope you’re right.”

—

Benson and Carisi returned to the 16th Precinct at ten o’clock on a morning which seemed to have gone on for at least a month already. Carisi called the four women whose babies were nearly snatched away from them to come in for IDs; only Roya was available immediately, so he sent an officer to pick her up in Rego Park. The perpetrator was a 75-year-old woman who had a record in Florida, where she’d been arrested four times for walking away with baby strollers. Her son had recognized the M.O., and was actually willing to work with SVU to make sure that she wasn’t able to commit the same crime again. 

By early afternoon, the case was on its way to arraignment. “Minor victory, huh?” he said to Benson.

“Take what you can get.”

“Officer Montero’s going to take Roya back home, he’ll drop me off home on his way back.”

“Good. Get some sleep.”

As he walked Roya out, Carisi saw Lainey Gilberti, the woman who’d stolen the ambulance the night before. (He’d made sure to get her name from the desk sergeant. Carvalho and the 16th’s homicide division insisted on being tight-lipped about what had led to the gunshots under the bridge, but Carisi wasn’t going to walk away with nothing.) Lainey had two officers with her, probably taking her down to arraignment court after a long night in interrogation. 

Roya’s eyes grew wide. “Detective Carisi,” she said, nudging him. “I know that lady.” 

“Who?”

“The one by the desk over there.”

“Are you sure?”

“She was hanging around the Lefrak City apartments a year ago, when I was pregnant with Sarah, chatting up all the pregnant women, telling everybody she worked for an adoption agency, a charity, and that she could help if we wanted her to. I didn’t trust her. And from the look on your face, Detective Carisi, I guess my instinct was right.”


	3. Chapter 3

“You don’t know how lucky you are that Juliana was willing to drive 180 miles back to the city after driving me and my bleeding head 180 miles home this morning.”

On Saturday night, only 24 hours after Carisi first found Barba in the Civic under the bridge, he and Benson were talking to Andy Carvalho in an interview room at SVU. “You could have waited until Monday,” Benson said. She wished he’d waited until Monday. Then she could have gone home to Noah, and Carisi could have gone home and slept.

“I want to get this cleared up,” Carvalho said. “I still don’t believe I owe you any information.”

“Lainey Gilberti running an adoption scam, going after pregnant women here in the city, that’s our business, and we need to know what you know about her.”

“Wouldn’t Queens SVU handle that?”

“She hijacked an ambulance in Midtown Manhattan, and we’re waiting on CSU to find out if she shot you.”

“Lainey didn’t shoot anybody. She knows how to steal a car, that’s all. And besides, the ambulance has nothing to do with SVU.”

“The adoption scam does,” Benson insisted. She looked over at Carisi, who was woozy with exhaustion.

“You guys suck at jurisdiction,” Carvalho said. ”The crimes themselves originated from Albany. What you’re investigating, or what you’re apparently investigating in place of your colleagues in Queens, is a matter for civil court.”

“What crimes, then, were you and Barba investigating?”

“Investigating. Please. We’re Harvard-educated attorneys.”

“What were you _investigating_ ,” she said, emphasizing that last word through her teeth, “that got your rideshare driver killed, and has Barba near death?”

Carisi opened his eyes, which he’d briefly, probably unwittingly, shut. “I’m going to get coffee,” he announced.

“And then you’re going to go home,” Benson said. 

“Yeah. I will.” He stood up and headed back out to the squad room. 

“Lieutenant Benson,” Carvalho said, “I am a victim.”

“I know. So is Barba. So is the driver.”

“You’re talking to me like I’m a suspect.”

“You’re not.”

Carvalho took a deep breath through his nose. “Your department broke Rafael, you know that, Lieutenant?”

“That was the DAs office.”

“Can you imagine what it was like for him, on trial for murder, on trial because a couple of hotshots had to prove a point after Ben Stone died?”

“I was there.”

“Then you know why —“

“I just want to know what you were investigating. Lainey was lurking around Rego Park. She was lurking around apartment complexes here in Manhattan, too. Queens says she’s all ours.”

“You guys _suck_ at jurisdiction,” Carvalho repeated. 

“Who does Lainey work for?”

“Somebody up in Albany.”

“Somebody.”

“Not your jurisdiction.”

“Will Barba tell us when he wakes up?”

“That’s entirely up to him.” Carvalho rubbed his eyes. “I shouldn’t have asked for his help.”

“On what?”

“Not your jurisdiction.”

“Leave that up to us.”

“He was working for my firm as a defense attorney. In our spare time, we were investigating a lawyer in the community who was running an adoption scam. Standard fare: process an infant adoption for ten different families, highest bidder gets the baby, no matter who that highest bidder is. Lawyer tells the nine other families that the baby’s parents were the ones running a scam, that there never was a baby to begin with. Lawyer keeps the fees for himself. Homicide can fill you in on the rest.”

“They don’t tell us anything.”

“Good for homicide. On my way back down I booked a hotel room through Wednesday, so that you and your questions don’t put Juliana out any more, having her drive me back and forth like this. I’m allowed to get behind the wheel again after 72 hours.”

“I told you, you could have waited until Monday.”

Carvalho stood, gripping the back of the chair to steady himself. “Rafael and I will bring what we have to the Attorney General when we’re ready.”

“What if he doesn’t make it?” Benson’s heart thudded against her rib cage, a reaction to her mouth simply forming those words. 

“If that happens, you and I can go find Hang ‘Em High McCoy and shoot him down in a car under the bridge, okay?” He cleared his throat. “Sorry. Not appropriate for the venue.”

“You know, we will eventually find out what brought you here.”

“What brought us here, to New York City, was a meeting with a client that was unrelated to …”

“To Lainey Gilberti?”

“Sure. I’ll see myself out. Have a good night.”

Benson found Carisi nursing a cup of coffee near his desk. “Go home,” she begged him.

“Attorney-client privilege,” Carisi said. “It’s everything to defense attorneys. And it’s important that it’s everything to defense attorneys. I think one of Carvalho’s clients must be involved.”

“Go home,” she said again.

—

At two in the morning, Benson was home in bed, still awake, jittery from exhaustion and worry. Barba was intubated in the ICU, in “critical but stable” condition, whatever that meant. Rollins’ career has a police detective was likely ended in the pettiest way possible, by a perpetrator stomping on her hand after she’d heroically stopped her from stealing an ambulance. And even after sitting in the interview room with Carvalho for an hour, even after tracking down everyone in homicide who would talk to her, all she knew was that Barba and Carvalho had been investigating an adoption scam run by a lawyer in Albany. 

She heard Noah in the bathroom. A minute later, he was standing in the doorway to her bedroom. “What is it, sweet boy?” she asked, more kindly than usual at two o’clock in the morning. 

“I don’t feel well.”

“Were you coughing?”

“No.”

“Is it your stomach?”

“No.”

Benson patted the spot on the bed next to her, and Noah climbed up. He clung to her but still wouldn’t say anything. “Did you hear me and Lucy talking about Uncle Rafa this morning?”

“I don’t know.”

She wished she could promise him that Barba would pull through. “He loves you very, very much,” she said, this time a half-truth for a kid who couldn’t possibly have understood why people who’d been fixtures in their lives, in their apartment, so often vanished for good, never to be heard from again. He couldn’t possibly have understood, but he _felt_ it, she was certain. 

She remembered the message from Barba that she’d quickly deleted back in May. She hadn’t needed another explanation of why he had to “move on.” But now, she wondered what would have happened if she’d listened to the whole message, if maybe Barba wouldn’t be in a medically induced coma following a five-hour-long operation. 

No. That was unproductive. That was as unproductive as “I have to move on.”

She turned onto her side. Noah was asleep.

—

_Do you feel guilty, sir?_  
_Yes. I do._

The most vulnerable she’d ever seen Barba was that day back in February when he took the stand, when Stone pressed him to answer the question of whether he felt guilty, when, red-eyed, he choked out an “I do,” lingering too long on the last syllable as tears welled up in his eyes.

Tonight, though he was physically in a vulnerable state — ventilation tube down his throat, feeding tube up his nose, what looked like a hundred more tubes splaying from various parts of his unconscious body, hospital gown rolled down in front to make space for heart monitors — he looked at peace with his life, his memories, and all the questionable decisions that had brought him here. Benson, her face covered with a hospital mask, watched his eyelids pulse involuntarily and hoped that his sleep was dreamless.

The nurse had told her to talk to him. 

“This is not how I expected you to come back home,” she said, hearing her own voice muffled through the mask, echoing lightly through the darkened isolation room. At least the mask, gloves, and paper gown meant that she was allowed to touch him, to lean in close, to offer some comfort. “You were supposed to show up at my door one day, I was supposed to kick you out in a fit of rage that you completely deserved, and you were supposed to beg for my forgiveness. But you’d never beg for anybody’s forgiveness, would you? Right, Rafa? You’re still that hotshot prosecutor I met 6 1/2 years ago. You are.”

She glanced back at the sliding door, making sure that it really was just her and Barba in the isolation room. “Listen, Barba,” she said, using his last name strategically, “in about 36 hours they’re going to try to take you off that ventilator. You had better breathe on your own for the doctors and nurses because —“ 

She trailed off. The words _I need you back_ wouldn’t come to her lips. Too much vulnerability on her part. Not worth it. Not worth him leaving again. 

But. 

If it really was true that he could unconsciously hear her, that he’d get a sense of what she was saying but not remember much when he woke up, she could motivate him. 

She glanced back at the door again, then back to Barba. 

“Here’s something I’m only telling you because _you have to wake up_ when they tell you to wake up, and you have to breathe when they tell you to breathe, you hear me? When you were furious with me because I didn’t disclose that I was with Tucker, I knew that only half of it was about the case. I knew. So you have to wake up when they wake you up, Rafa, you have to, because you have to be exasperated with me and I have to tell you what an asshole you are for leaving me when I was finally ready to be with you.” She leaned in a little closer, not so close as to touch him, but close enough. “You want another reason to wake up? Sometimes — I’m not saying always, so don’t get too smug — late at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I’d picture us squabbling about something or other in your office, you telling me I didn’t have enough evidence, and then I’d kiss you, hard, to wipe that gorgeous smirk off your face, and I’d unbutton the fly of that gray wool suit, the three-piece with the vest, push you down into your desk chair and —“

Her stomach jumped up into her throat when she heard the sliding door behind her. “Lieutenant Benson?” 

Barba’s mother. 

She was already all the way inside the room. 

Mortified, Benson wondered if the sound she’d heard was the door opening, or the door closing. 

“What?” Lucia said. “I heard nothing.”

“Okay. I’ll give you some time with him.”

“That’s all right. The doctors and nurses have been saying all different things about whether he can hear us. I wouldn’t want to, well, confuse him.”

Benson’s cheeks burned beneath the mask, a sensation of embarrassment she hadn’t felt in 20, maybe 30 years. “I’m sorry,” she stammered out, and opened the door, heading back to the waiting room to remove her mask and gown. 

In the waiting room, she filled a plastic cup from the cooler with water, drank it quickly, and then crushed the cup in the palm of her hand, angry with herself for doing something so _stupid_ , because whether he could hear her or not, sharing your sexual fantasies with a man in a coma who might or might not be able to hear you, but couldn’t converse with you, was outright _stupid_. Poor judgment. Stupid judgment.

“Lieutenant?” Lucia was back. 

“It’s Olivia, please.” She wanted to cry. She wanted to go home. She wanted to hide under her bed. She wanted to retire. She wanted Barba to wake up. “I, uh, have to get back to my son. We were visiting one of my detectives, my whole senior squad was visiting with her, the one who broke her hand. They insisted I leave him with them so I could visit Rafael, I’m sorry, I’ve been … there’s no excuse.”

“There’s no excuse for you and my son having a thing for each other for — years? — and not acting on it. You’re meant for each other. Equally dense.”

“There’s no excuse for me saying what I said to him when he couldn’t say anything back,” Benson told her. “And the reason for … everything else … was that hundreds of cases would have had to have been re-examined.” 

When he told her he was leaving the DAs office, standing on Centre Street on a frozen-over February afternoon, she believed for a split second that he was going to tell her he loved her, and ask her if they could finally be a little more than best friends now, and kiss her lips, and make her a thousand promises. She said “And …?” but instead of “I love you,” he kissed her forehead and told her that he had to move on from her, not move on with her. 

“Give me your number,” Lucia said. “I’ll call you Tuesday.” 

“Thank you.” 

“Come here,” Lucia said, opening her arms in Benson’s direction, drawing her into a hug. She ran a comforting hand up and down Benson’s back. “Don’t beat yourself up. That’s not what Rafael wants. You know him, you were his friend, you know that’s not what he’d want.”

On her way out of the hospital, she passed a newsstand which still had the Sunday papers on display. The Daily News headline: _Baby-Killer ADA on Life Support_. The only word in that headline that was objectively true was “on.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Weekly-or-so updates from here on out. This plot is weird. Don't encourage me ;-)


	4. Chapter 4

He was on Benson’s couch, his head resting on her lap, looking up at her while late-night television glowed from a medical monitor mounted to the tv stand in the middle of the living room. He wore his gray three-piece wool suit, a good choice for a cold December evening, a terrible choice for watching tv on the couch. Benson brushed her hand over his crotch. “I’m a trained detective,” she said, leaning in close, her lips approaching his. 

The full package of #2 pencils was still sticking out of his throat. He was, at the very least, disappointed.

“I need you to _breathe_ when they tell you to _breathe_ ,” she said, yanking a pencil out on each “breathe.” She repeated the phrase again, and then again, over and over until all the pencils were out.

“I love you,” he said, but he couldn’t hear his own voice.

He was under a bridge in Manhattan, traffic was loud overhead, and the pencils were back in his throat. 

When he turned around, sensing another body behind him, he saw his father. A sensation of cold — freezing cold — crept through him, from his extremities into his belly. Snow was falling, the East River was flooding, and there was his father, ready to grab him any minute now, he was sure. 

“Olivia.” The name came out as a choked-back sob. “Tell —“

Again: darkness, silence, nothing.

—-

Carisi took a vacation day on Monday so he could catch up on the sleep he’d missed when he was awake for more than 48 hours straight over the weekend, leaving Benson without either of her senior detectives. They were fortunate not to catch any new cases, so she spent most of the day in her office doing paperwork, occasionally coming out into the squad room to coordinate with Fin. 

On Tuesday, Carisi came in an hour late, but Benson didn’t reprimand him since, between finding Barba near death, assisting Rollins when she was injured, and closing the baby-snatcher case, he’d had a rough few days. She had her cell phone in front of her on her desk, volume turned all the way up so she wouldn’t miss Lucia’s call. She probably wouldn’t hear from her until later in the day, she reminded herself, because they had to let Barba try breathing on his own a few times while the tube was still in before removing it altogether. 

“Morning, Lieu,” Carisi said, clutching a large paper cup from the coffee cart that was always parked outside the precinct. “You got a minute?”

Benson held out a hand toward the chairs on the other side of her desk, signaling for Carisi to sit. “You’ve got five open cases on your desk. I hope this isn’t about anything that you’re not supposed to be investigating.”

“One of those open cases is the adoption scam,” he said. 

“And you’re handing that one over to the staties as soon as you’re done interviewing the women who Gilberti talked to.” 

He sipped the coffee, swishing it around in his mouth for a second. “Homicide has Robert Kessilton, the attorney allegedly running the scam, coming in tomorrow, finally. I’ll be sitting in.”

“How’d you swing that?”

“I was annoying. And Kessilton is relevant to our case, even if he’s not responsible for what happened to Barba and Carvalho.” 

“You think he’s not responsible? He’s got to be. They were investigating a scam he was running. The connection is obvious.” 

“I’m going to be a regular Constitutional scholar here and remind you he’s innocent until proven guilty, entitled to trial by a jury of his peers, and —“

“What’s your gut telling you?”

“My gut hasn’t met him yet. Any news on Barba?”

“No.” She glanced at her phone. “They said it may take a few tries to get him off the ventilator, so it could be a while before we get any news. What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Like I said, I’m sitting in on the interrogation tomorrow. It turns out this guy, this Kessilton, is this super-eccentric lawyer who’ll represent anybody for anything. He’s also filed lawsuits against God and somebody’s pet turtle just to prove points about tort reform. Picture Dworkin, but stupid.”

“Dworkin-but-stupid,” she repeated, scrunching her mouth into a narrow, judgmental smile. 

“And beloved by everyone who meets him. In the suburb where he lives, he’s a saint. When Carvalho originally brought up the possibility that this guy was running an adoption scam, the reaction was, “he’s a great guy! A little eccentric, sure, but how dare you accuse him of running a scam. He helped our family with …” and so on and so on.”

“Really,” she said flatly. 

“So you want to know the story? This is just between me and you.”

“Go on.”

“Carvalho knew Barba wanted out of the DAs office, he and Rita Calhoun, who’s also a friend of theirs from Harvard, offered him associate positions with their firms, but Barba chose —“

“I meant the story about Kessilton,” she said, interrupting Carisi before he could tell her that Barba chose the position with Carvalho’s firm because he needed to get as far away from the DAs office, as far away from SVU, and as far away from _her_ as possible without leaving the only state in which he was licensed to practice law. 

“Last year one of Kessilton’s clients came to Carvalho because she’d gone to Kessilton for a simple case, landlord kept her security deposit, could have been resolved in her favor easily in arbitration. He screws up so bad she winds up having to pay the landlord’s legal fees. She writes a bad review of him on Yelp, and a week later her car gets stolen.”

“And nobody caught on to the fact that Kessilton’s girlfriend knows how to steal a car?” Benson asked, remembering the Lainey Gilberti connection. 

“Story’s not done. Two days after the car’s reported stolen, Kessilton himself finds it at a chop shop, windows smashed but all in one piece. He’s applauded as a hero and the client forgives him.”

Benson leaned back in her chair. “You got homicide to tell you all this?”

“Yes.”

She generously did not add _even though you haven’t been at the precinct since Saturday night._

“All right, so when you sit in on the interrogation tomorrow —“

“Interview. Not enough to arrest him yet, unbelievably, and he doesn’t seem to care that we arrested Lainey.”

“Get what you need about the adoptions, and then we’re handing this to the state police and the attorney general and we’re dropping it.”

“All right.” He stood up and headed for the door. “Thanks, Lieutenant. Let me know when you hear about Barba.”

“I will.”

_Don’t do anything that jeopardizes any SVU, state, or federal cases here_ , she wanted to say, but coming out of her mouth, that would be hypocritical. 

The call came in at 3. Her stomach churned. “He’s awake, and breathing, and complaining,” Lucia announced. “He’s a little confused about why he’s still in the city, he doesn’t remember anything that happened after the meeting he came in for, but they said that’s normal. They’re bringing him down for a CAT scan in a few minutes. Routine, they told me.”

After what happened with Dodds a few years ago, her brain wouldn’t let her breathe out just yet. When she told Carisi and Fin, they had the same reaction, even as Fin tried to assure her that it sounded like the doctors thought he’d pull through. “It’s different,” he told her, knowing what she was thinking, what she was remembering, even as he didn’t necessarily believe that himself. “Are you going to go see him?”

“Yes.” She could wait until tomorrow, give Lucy a break, let her go home before six for once, but after seeing a detective die unexpectedly after his colleagues and parents were assured that he’d pulled through surgery just fine, she knew it was important to go immediately, just in case. 

But this was different.

It had to be different, she told herself. 

She had to allow herself to breathe a sigh of relief. 

—

In the elevator on her way up to ICU, Benson ran into a pair of detectives from the 16th precinct’s homicide division. “Don’t stress him out too much,” she said. “And share your relevant notes with SVU if you’re so inclined.”

They gave her a cursory, “Yes, Lieutenant,” and went in to talk to Barba while she sat in the waiting room. They returned ten minutes later and walked straight past her, back to the elevators.

Their own lieutenant had surely told them not to talk to her, because “SVU is always stealing cases from homicide, screwing up CompStat.” That was always the line when SVU took over an investigation to try to get justice for a victim who’d been overlooked in a big-picture investigation. 

A nurse helped her put on a gown, gloves, and mask again, and led her into the isolation room where she’d last seen Barba unconscious on Sunday. He was awake now, his hospital bed in more of an upright position, his head resting on a pillow while he squinted at a television in the corner of the room. “I’m not talking to any more NYPD,” he said, a joke meant to distract her from the fact that his face had beamed for a split second when he saw her enter the room. 

The ventilator and feeding tubes were gone, replaced by an oxygen cannula in his nose, and the tubes coming out of his collarbone were replaced by IVs in his hands and arms. 

She covered one of his hands with her blue-gloved hands, and he shifted his position so he could squeeze her fingers. “Liv,” was all he said. 

“I know.” Their hands were now completely interlocked. “It’s okay. You’re all right.”

“I’m an idiot.”

“I agree, but right now, I am so, so glad you’re alive.” 

She saw his chest rise and fall with laughter. He quickly lost his breath, but coughed once, cleared his throat, and looked back up at her. “Tell me something.”

“Yes?”

“Did Andy Carvalho really make it?”

“Yes, he was in my office on Saturday night.” 

“Good. I thought Mami and the homicide detectives were lying because they thought it’d kill me if I knew I’d gotten him killed.”

“Rafa.” She saw the hair on his arm standing on end. “What happened?”

“I don’t remember. Mami said Carisi found me in a car under the Queensborough Bridge. Is that true? The last thing I remember is leaving an afternoon meeting with a client.”

“That’s normal, not to remember,” she said, stroking his arm absentmindedly. “The homicide detectives are probably going to use some techniques to try to help you remember, but it might be better for you — psychologically — if you don’t.”

“I still walk through Drew Householder’s hospital room in my mind in full focus, in perfect detail, when I’m falling asleep at night.” He closed his eyes. She saw him swallow, hard, and then wince from the pain in his throat. “Did you visit me while I was under?” 

“Once, yes.”

“You said that I had to breathe when you told me to breathe.”

“Yes.” She gently ran a gloved hand through his hair. “I also told you that you were an asshole for walking away when I was finally ready to be with you.”

An expression of surprise washed over his face, and he let out a small “oh.”

“But I’m an asshole for deleting your message.”

“No. That was very reasonable on your part.” He blinked a few times, his eyelids heavy. “I’m tired. I don’t understand why, I’ve been asleep for how many days now?”

“You’ve been through a gunshot wound and major surgery. Your body is tired.” She rubbed his shoulder, and he closed his eyes again, his lips falling together into a probably-unintended “mmm.” 

“Stay,” he begged, most certainly the effect of painkillers kicking in. His eyes were still closed as he dragged her hand to his heart. “Please.”

Those had been the two words in her mind, at the tip of her tongue, on her heart, when he’d told her he had to move on: _Stay, please._


	5. Chapter 5

“What are you doing here?” Benson asked when she saw Rollins sitting at her desk, her right arm resting in a sling, hand set in a plaster cast, her left arm spreading printed reports across the surface in front of her.

“Desk duty.”

“I thought you were taking the whole week.”

“I was home, bored, and my mom has generously agreed to stay with us for two weeks. Not good for my health.”

Benson leaned over Rollins’ shoulder. “All right. I get it. You’re going through forensics reports?”

“That’s where they’re probably transferring me soon.”

“Wait to see what the orthopedist says.”

She touched her left hand to the cast. “I’ve got a pin in here for at least two months, and another surgery after that. I’m done, Liv.”

“I’m sorry. I’m heading downstairs to check up on Carisi.”

_Picture Dworkin-but-stupid._ When she saw Robert Kessilton through the glass in one of homicide’s interrogation rooms, she wasn’t expecting a 6-foot-4 gray-haired man somewhere between 250 and 275 pounds. She was also surprised that Kessilton, an attorney, was on board with being questioned in an interrogation room when he wasn’t under arrest. 

“The extra money I get from the adoptions goes to a _charity_ ,” he was telling the homicide detective and Carisi. “You can go ahead and report me to the Bar Association if you really want to, but I’m telling you, this is a Robin Hood type of operation they’re running. The fees we collect from the other families, the ones who don’t get the babies, those go to a charity to make sure that foster kids get adopted.” 

“What charity?” the homicide detective asked.

“I can’t say. Attorney-client privilege.”

“You can’t name a charity that’s helping foster kids get adopted because of attorney-client privilege?”

“I told you, they’ll be looked down on because of their funding methods.”

Benson watched Carisi stand up and head for the door. “So what’s your take on Kessilton?” he asked her.

“My take is that unless at least one adoption involved a birth parent in New York City and a criminal act that also took place in New York City, there’s no place for SVU here.”

“The girlfriend, Lainey, she’s been arrested for car theft four, five times in the last 15 years. I think she and whoever’s really behind the adoption scam are taking advantage of this guy’s gullibility.”

“Still, whatever happened with those adoptions is probably a matter for the feds.”

“Probably. I’ve got to get back to my other cases. How’s Barba?”

“They’re moving him to the regular hospital ward today.”

“Good, good. They were in much deeper shit than they thought, Barba and Carvalho.”

“ I don’t like this Kessilton guy, but I make him as gullible. I’m actually a little worried about him, that he’ll be the next target of whoever he’s protecting,” Benson said.

“His gullibility is what got that rideshare driver killed. His gullibility is why Barba was in a coma for three days.”

When they returned to the squad room upstairs, Rollins and Fin were poring over a report on Rollins’ laptop screen. “Hey, Carisi, you want to tell your friends downstairs they missed something?” she said. “CSU was kind enough to copy us on the ballistics report.”

“Not our case anymore,” Benson said.

“You want to hear what Rollins has to say,” Fin insisted.

“I could be wrong, but it looks to me from CSU’s report that Barba was shot from inside the car. The bullet didn’t go straight through him, so if it came from the front seat, it came from someone who didn’t have experience handling a pistol. Homicide needs to look at Carvalho.”

“No no no,” Carisi said, leaning in closer to Rollins’ laptop, “that means they need to look at the driver. But even the driver, he took a bullet straight through the forehead, I was there, that bullet one hundred percent had to have come from outside the car.” He went on, struggling to modulate his voice as he spoke to his colleagues. “The tire was shot out, you remember that, Rollins, _you remember that_ , somebody was definitely outside the car.”

“They found shell casings at the scene. There might have been two or three different guns. Homicide dropped the ball.” Rollins looked up at Carisi, searching his face. “Look, all I’m saying is they have to at least clear Carvalho and the driver. The report suggests that they have to clear them.”

“Is it possible that Carvalho got in really deep with whatever was going on with Kessilton?” Benson asked. “Someone a lot more powerful than Kessilton had him convinced that he was stealing from prospective parents with nice bank accounts to benefit foster kids, when that was obviously a lie. Lainey’s taking him for a ride, too, I’m sure, but there must be someone more powerful at the helm here.”

“I don’t know,” Rollins said. “All this report tells me is that homicide has got to question Carvalho.”

“You let them know,” Carisi told her. “I’ve got other cases to close, and you’re the one with the forensics degree.”

“Rollins and I will talk to homicide,” Benson offered. “After that, we are off this case. There’s no professional reason for us to be involved anymore.”

—

At 5, Benson met Stone at Forlini’s to ask him how far along he was on a sexual assault case that she knew he wasn’t far enough along on. While she was waiting for him, Lucia called to tell her that Barba wouldn’t be settled into his hospital room until around 7, so it was best to wait until the next day to visit. “You make sure you tell any detectives who come by the same thing, all right?” she instructed Lucia. “Don’t let them bother him while he’s recovering.”

Stone was gone by 5:30 and Benson was reaching for her purse when she saw Carisi slide into the seat that Stone had vacated. He ordered a scotch. “You do want to be a prosecutor when you grow up,” Benson teased.

“Yeah.” He took a sip and forced a smile. “Yeah, sure.”

“Anybody ever tell you you’re supposed to take time off and rest, talk to a therapist, get a little extra sleep when you almost get killed, when you can’t save a victim’s life, when you wade into deep shit on this job?”

“My lieutenant, but I’ve been really bad about taking her advice on that.”

She finished her glass of wine and left two dollars underneath it as a tip. “A little while before your time here, we were investigating a serial pedophile rapist. We couldn’t find the guy, and a whole neighborhood on the East Side was terrified. So there was this man, this upstanding community member, running an anti-pedophile operation that we had to rein in, because it was a vigilante thing, and you know how McCoy feels about vigilante justice. But I thought he had some useful information, and I thought he was cute, so my former partner and I decided it wouldn’t hurt for me to have dinner and a glass of wine with him privately, kill two birds with one stone, you know.”

“No offense, Lieutenant —“

“We’re at a bar. Call me Liv.”

“No offense, but there’s no reason for you tell me this.”

“He turned out to be the serial we were trying to catch.”

“And?”

“If you need a friend —“

“Right now, I need a drink, and tomorrow, I need to come in and do my work.”

“All right.” She patted Carisi’s arm. “I’m going to be in late tomorrow. After I take Noah to school, I’m stopping by Mercy.”

“Giving Barba fair warning?”

“Maybe he remembers something. I don’t know. They need to look at the driver for this too, and Lainey Gilberti, if she’s smart enough to be able to steal an ambulance, she’s smart enough to arrange a hit on two lawyers.”

“This looked nothing like a hit job.”

“There’s still a lot of possible angles,” Benson tried to assure him.

“Fin’s right. Homicide dropped the ball. Let ‘em do what they have to do.”

— 

When Barba woke up at his desk in his office on Centre Street, a late-night dinner spread out in front of him, he hoped for a split second that the last year had been a dream. But when he stood up and tried to read the text of the Harvard Law diploma hanging on the wall, which was a jumbled mess that changed every time he looked back at it, he knew he had no such luck. 

He heard a knock on his door, and looked up to find Benson standing in the doorway. They were both dressed like they’d been in court that afternoon, her in a black pantsuit with a purple button down shirt, him in his gray three-piece, minus the jacket, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened. “You can’t let Buchanan get away with this,” Benson said, shutting the door behind her.

He slammed his hand down on the desk. “Then get me more evidence before the judge throws this case out the window.”

“I got you all the evidence there is. Work with it.”

“You are the one who needs to —“

She cut him off with a kiss, rolling her tongue against his to shut him up. “Mmph, you need to —“ he tried to say again, but she was already unbuttoning his vest, and then his fly, and he was already hard. (Ten seconds. This was either a dream or he was twenty-five again.) Benson pushed him down into his desk chair. 

“Right here,” she said, “I want you right here, and then we’ll finish our argument, which I’ll win.” She grinded against him and planted her lips on his neck. 

“Yes,” he moaned, his hips bucking against her, the sound of his own voice echoing through the office as he heard the sound of a door — a sliding door, like on a patio or a balcony, sliding, _swish swish_ — and then the fantasy was abruptly interrupted by the sight of Lucia Barba at the other end of the room, saying “I wouldn’t want to, well, confuse him.”

He woke up with a start (and a little nausea in his throat) and found himself sitting in a patient recliner in his hospital room at Mercy — a private room because he was still at risk for infection, private, thank God — with his half-eaten breakfast in front of him. The doctors had warned him that as he recovered, he’d be exhausted by simple things, like moving from the bed to the chair to eat breakfast. At least, he thought, pulling the blanket off the bed and into his lap, he’d have some good news for the urologist visiting him later that day.

He quickly cleared his throat as he spotted the nurse helping Benson put on gloves and a paper gown just outside his door.

“No more mask,” Benson said. “Glad to see you sitting up. Nice legs.”

Barba let out a quick laugh and wiggled his toes in his hospital socks. The nurse returned with a booklet, which she handed to Barba. “Rehab hospitals, as promised,” she said. “ _Columbia es la mejor, pero está muy fácil para su mama llegar allí_.”

“So you’ve had the pleasure, then?”

“We’ve had to keep telling her that because of privacy laws, we can’t give her any information about her 48-year-old son.”

“Never stopped her before. _Pero quiero ir a casa._ ”

“ _Hemos hablado de esto._ You have to be discharged into a rehab hospital first.”

“They keep telling me there’s a 100 percent muscle atrophy rate for people who are intubated in the ICU,” he said to Benson, “but I don’t know what they’re talking about. I still look good.”

“I’ll make sure he goes where he’s supposed to go,” Benson promised the nurse.

“He’s lucky to have you.”

When the nurse left to check on her next patient, Benson sat in a chair opposite his. “You look good, yes, but —“

“I know, I’ll go. As long as I’m home for Christmas.”

“Where’s home?”

“For Christmas, Mami’s. After that, Albany until I find work in the city again.”

She bit her lower lip. “Worry about healing first.”

“Liv, what’s up?” 

“Homicide is coming to see you later.”

“Why?”

She sucked in a deep breath through her nose. “They were questioning Kessilton and Gilberti, assuming one of them pulled the trigger, but, as it turned out, ballistics show that the bullet that hit you was different from the ones that hit your driver, Carvalho, and the tire, and that bullet very likely came from the front seat, from someone inexperienced at handling a pistol. Homicide is going to ask if you if Carvalho might have shot you.”

“Excuse me.” He tried to get to his feet, but had trouble standing up straight, so he sat back down and reached for his phone near the bed. He clutched his side, coughed once, and then composed himself fully again. 

“Is it possible —“

“ _Excuse me_ , I have to call Rita Calhoun.”

“Rafa, please, hold up a second. Is it possible —“

“No, it’s not “possible” and if you’re going to set Andy up to be destroyed when it was either the driver or someone else who crawled into the front seat, or reached an arm over the driver to shoot me, if you’re involved in looking at Andy for this, then you can just leave.”

“I trust your judgment,” she said matter-of-factly.

“I’ve known him for 25 years.”

“I trust you.” She didn’t bring up the fact that he’d been wrong before in his judgment of old friends’ character. In that moment, as a friend rather than a police lieutenant, she had to trust him. 

“I can’t tell you much, but this will be a matter for the Attorney General eventually. It’s my fault. When Andy realized that Kessilton was only the tip of the iceberg, I pushed him to keep going, because I was worried about the kids who might have been endangered in the adoption scam. Look how far I got trying to redeem myself. I’m stuck in a hospital and Andy’s going to get picked up by NYPD.”

“I can’t stop them, though. The ballistics report says you were most likely shot by someone in the front seat who didn’t know how to handle the weapon. Homicide has to at least rule Carvalho out.”

“I’ll get in touch with Rita.”

“Do that.”

“You did the right thing, giving me a heads up,” he said as he started to compose a text message.

“Not from NYPD’s perspective. What are you telling her?”

“Privileged.”

“No, it’s not.”

“She’s going to be his attorney. It’s privileged.”

“Your communications with her —“

“Enough.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Enough, enough.” She stood to leave. He grabbed her hand. “Liv. I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at homicide, I’m mad about what I can most certainly see Jack McCoy trying to pull in a few weeks.”

Barba closed his eyes. She could tell he was struggling, so she squeezed his hand. “I still say that knowing what I knew, I should never have called you in on the Householder case.”

“Not your fault.”

“Why did he have to try you for murder?” she asked.

“That’s a good question.”

McCoy’s decision and the subsequent trial had broken him so badly that she almost couldn’t blame him for leaving. Almost. She would never not be hurt by the fact that he’d left.

“Rafa?” she prompted.

“Carvalho’s gotten himself caught up in a few conflicts of interest over the years, but he’d never knowingly commit a crime, certainly not attempted murder.”

“Conflicts of interest?”

“This is between us. Hypothetical, even. He has some bad habits with, let’s say, romantic conflicts-of-interest. Deputy attorneys general, federal prosecutors, you know how it is. You’ve been there.” 

“If you weren’t recovering from near-death, I would smack you upside the head.”

“No worse than Jack McCoy," he said, quickly hedging on his observation. "McCoy’s had long-term relationships, one marriage, with four of his assistants.” Barba stopped to read her face again. “What happened, Liv?”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure. I look out for my squad, though.”

He waved a hand in front of his chest. “If this involves outing someone, don’t tell me.”

“I won’t.” She stood up, sat on the armrest of Barba’s chair, and kissed the top of his head, briefly nuzzling her face into his hair. 

“Hey, Liv?” He licked his lips. “I remember something.”

“That’s way too convenient.”

“Not about being shot. When you visited me while I was unconscious, I know you told me I had to breathe when they took me off the ventilator, and I know you called me an asshole, but … what else did you say?”

“Why?”

“I dreamt that you and I —“

“You dreamt that we were arguing in your office and I took your dick out of your pants and pushed you down into your desk chair?” she asked, forcing the words out quickly. 

“Um, yes.” 

“So, in a moment of fear and desperation, I tried to motivate you to recover by sharing a sexual fantasy. It was extraordinarily inappropriate, given that you were not conscious, and I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I got what I deserved, though, because your mother showed up while I was telling you all this, and I’ve never been more humiliated.” 

“That explains a lot.” 

“Oh, no, did your mother show up in the middle of the dream?”

“Yes,” he said, and they laughed, together. 

Benson’s phone buzzed. “Work calls,” she said with a sigh. 

“You trust me on Carvalho?” he asked as she stood up. 

“I trust you.” 

“Hey.” He reached over and touched her elbow. “You meant it when you said you were “ready to be with me”?”

“I was ready to be with you that day you left.” 

“Speaks to my stupidity.” Then, looking at the IVs still in his hand, “As does this.” 

“You know better than to think being shot through the spleen was your own fault.”

“When I’m not the Boy in the Bubble anymore, I owe you a non-forehead kiss, I owe you a day of holding you, and I owe you whatever else you want.”

“I’ll see you soon. Get better.” She touched her gloved hand to her lips, and then to her heart. She could have said more, but still lingering at the back of her mind was the worry that as soon as he was fully recovered, he’d change his tune and realize, again, that he was better off as far away as possible from the people and departments that had broken him. 

But: _I owe you a day of holding you._ He really could be sweet — dopey-sweet, romantic-sweet — when he wanted to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (why am I still writing this why why why)


	6. Chapter 6

Rita Calhoun marched into the SVU squad room late Monday afternoon, out for blood. Benson, who was in her office getting ready to leave for the day, heard the commotion. She found Fin and Rollins trying to tell Calhoun that she needed to take her complaints up with homicide; Calhoun wasn’t listening.

“Lieutenant.” She walked up to Benson, crossed her arms and stared her down. “How could you let this happen?”

“Let’s take a breath and discuss whatever we need to discuss in my office.”

“No, we’ll discuss it right here,” she said, remaining in position.

“Carvalho went in for questioning this morning,” Fin explained, “and they arrested him.”

“I just got back from arraignment,” Calhoun said, unfolding her arms so that she could check her phone. “We’ve got the entire Harvard Law class of ’95 raising bail. This is atrocious. How dare you let this happen, how dare you.”

“I have no —“

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“Ms. Calhoun, homicide has its own lieutenant,” Rollins said. “There’s nothing our lieutenant could have done.”

“You could have called in a favor,” she said, still staring Benson down. “Or, you could have warned homicide about what happens in IAB, the state courts, the mayor’s office, the governor’s office, and the press when you arrest someone — a crime victim, for God’s sake — without probable cause.”

“If it was me,” Benson said, “I would have held off on arresting him until we’d looked into the driver’s background. The way it was done makes no sense to me either.”

“Their logic is that it couldn’t have been the driver because he was shot through the head.”

“But there’s clear evidence of a second shooter,” Rollins said. “The driver could have shot Barba, and then the second guy could have shot the driver.”

“They can’t find a gun. The driver had no weapons registered to him. But Andy’s a top-tier law school graduate who made partner at 40, one of the best defense attorneys in upstate New York, one of the best defense attorneys I know, and he’s in Rikers. If whoever’s behind Kessilton and Gilberti’s operation knows anybody there, if they want him dead, he’s screwed. Goddamn it, Benson, I’m not going to let you destroy any more of my friends.”

“Liv, you said you were on your way home to Noah?” Rollins prompted, making her way towards the exit. “I’ll walk down with you.”

“I will do whatever I can,” Benson promised Calhoun before heading out.

“She doesn’t get it,” Rollins said when they were standing outside the precinct. “This is homicide’s fuck-up. The 16th hasn’t had a captain since Cragen. They should promote you, make you captain of the whole 16th, let you get everything under control.”

“Then I can solve everyone’s problems while I’m being blamed for them, right?”

“I’m sorry. This sucks.” She held up her plaster-casted right hand. “For all of us.”

“I know.”

“Wait,” Rollins said, “did they look at Lainey Gilberti’s hands when they arrested her?”

“I have no idea. I wasn’t there, and it wasn’t my case.”

“I’m trying to remember. I was sitting on the ground in pain. Carisi and I were trying to process everything — her stealing that ambulance was the _weirdest_ thing we’ve ever seen at a crime scene. I don’t think they looked at her hands. She’s dangerously impulsive, stealing the ambulance and breaking a detective’s hand. She could have shot the driver.”

“Carvalho himself said he didn’t think so.”

“He was in the car. He was grazed, bleeding, scared for Barba. When you interviewed him, he must have been exhausted. The chances he was thinking straight are slim. Lainey could have shot the driver, but they never looked at her hands, and with no weapons recovered, we’ve got no evidence. Homicide’s got no evidence, I mean.”

“I’m heading uptown to see Barba,” Benson said. “They transferred him into the rehab hospital yesterday. He must be stir-crazy in there, knowing he can’t do anything for his friend.”

“You’ll find a way to entertain him.”

“Bite your tongue, detective.”

“I have a really good response to that, a really good one, but we’re in front of the precinct, which means you’re my boss right now.”

Benson cracked a smile. “Watch it, Amanda.”

“You want me to see if I can find out if they made any progress on recovering the guns?”

“Find out for sure whether anybody looked at Lainey’s hands. This isn’t our case, but I need to get Rita Calhoun off my back, and we all need to get Andy Carvalho back home, back to his law firm.”

—-

At the rehab hospital, a staff member led Benson to Barba’s room, where the door was open a crack. “Come in,” Barba said.

Barba sat in a patient recliner next to a hospital bed, a similar setup to what he’d had at Mercy, but the IVs were gone. He wore a T-shirt, sweatpants, and hospital socks, also an improvement over the hospital gowns he’d been in for the last nine days. As Benson opened the door further, she was surprised to see Carisi sitting in a smaller chair in the corner of the room, shoulders slouched, hands clasped together.

“What are you doing awake?” Benson asked Carisi. “I thought you were covering the overnight tonight.”

“I slept all morning. I’m good to go.”

“Be aware, then, Calhoun’s lurking around the precinct.”

“I heard. Rollins sent me a couple texts to warn me.” Carisi stood up and Barba, gripping the armrests of his recliner, stood too, his legs still unsteady. The two men shook hands and nodded at each other. “Calhoun’ll probably be off our backs once bail is raised, for now, at least. Let her go after homicide on probable cause. See you in the morning, Lieu. Rafael, next time I see you, you’d better be running around the room, doing jumping jacks, shotput, the triathlon, the decathlon —“

“Have a good evening, Carisi.”

“All these years, this guy still won’t call me Sonny. ‘Night, counselor. Thank you.”

Carisi left, closing the door behind him. Barba sat on the bed and motioned for Benson to come closer. She sat next to him, and leaned close until their foreheads touched. “You okay?” he asked.

“Don’t worry about me.”

“What did Rita say to you?”

“It’s not important.”

“Come here,” he said, reclining on the bed, the head of which was positioned at a 45-degree angle. Since the bed rails were down, Benson was a little worried that she’d send him crashing to the floor, incurring even more of Rita Calhoun’s wrath, but she put her feet up and rested her head near his shoulder, being careful not to lean on his torso. He pushed her hair behind her ear, his long fingers running across her scalp as they lay in silence for a while.

“You know I’m not angry with you, right?” he said. “I’m furious, but not with you.”

“Do you remember anything at all about being shot?”

“No. Everything that happened after the meeting that we came into the city for, I don’t remember. We supposedly had dinner before we got in the car, and I don’t remember that either. I can’t even say it’s a blur. It’s just not _there_.”

“Maybe when you’re off the painkillers.”

“I already am. I’m only on Tylenol.”

“Already?”

“Just a little gunshot wound to a couple of organs. I can take it.”

“Rafa.” She touched his jaw and carefully turned his head so he was facing her. He responded with a kiss, the kind of deep and desperate kiss you’d get from a man who was recovering from death. 

“Stay a little while?” he asked. Funny, ironic maybe, how much he wanted her to stay.

“I have to relieve Lucy by 7.”

“So you’ve got, what —“

“Half an hour.”

Barba picked up the tv remote attached to the bed and used it to turn on the tv in the corner of the room. “Might as well,” he said, running his free hand over her shoulder and down her arm, then resting it on her upper thigh. “We can’t do anything _fun_ here.”

“I know, a staff member or your mother might walk in.”

Barba shuddered.

“See,” Benson said, “now I’ve taken that possibility completely off the table. You should thank me.”

“Thank you, Olivia,” he said, his voice dripping with (fairly delicious) sarcasm.

“I know this show. This is the one about the forensics lab scientists who think they’re cops.”

“It’s been on all day. The only other options are reality shows.”

“Years ago, as in _years_ ago, Lennie Briscoe, an old-school detective from the two-seven I worked a few cases with, told me I had to watch this show because of how spectacularly bad the police work is.”

“What police work? Every once in a while they bring in a detective as a love interest for one of the other characters, or for a storyline about corruption, but I’ve seen at least three episodes in a row without any detectives in the interrogation room. If I was a defense attorney in this world, I’d get every single case thrown out. Every single case, ten minutes with a judge, tops.”

“What is _that_?” Benson asked, squinting in the direction of the TV. 

“They’re trying to catch a serial killer who builds perfectly detailed scale models of crime scenes. I’ve been watching this all day.”

“I wish our criminals built detailed models of their own crime scenes.”

“If only.” His fingers were fiddling with the hem of her shirt. She loved the intimacy, hated how they’d arrived at this point, hated that there was a chance he’d end their romantic relationship before it really began.

Just before she’d started at SVU, she’d ended a 5-year-long romantic relationship with a man whose career aspirations were taking him across the country, while hers demanded that she stay in New York. Three years into her tenure at SVU, she’d lost her mother, suddenly and fairly horrifically, before they could work out what was between them. Elliot Stabler, once her confidant, was completely gone from her life, no evidence left of him except for the yearly Christmas card sent from his family. Nick Amaro’s life was too complicated for him to stay in touch. Alex Cabot was basically in hiding. And then the string of failed romantic relationships in the last 7 years — Hayden, Cassidy, Tucker — two out of three which had themselves ended in forehead kisses, all in abrupt goodbyes. 

Love was something that ended. 

Barba reached for his phone, which was buzzing against the tray table. She quickly realized he was talking to Calhoun, so she stood up and put on her coat. He held up one finger in front of his face, signaling for her to wait a minute. “Yes,” he said into the phone. “Good. Do that. The DA _must_ decline to prosecute as long as the driver’s history hasn’t been fully investigated. Otherwise he’s looking at a clear-cut Fourth Amendment violation.”

After the call was over, he told Benson that the Harvard Law class of ’95 had successfully raised bail. “It’s after 6, though,” he said. “Andy’ll be stuck in Rikers for the night. Bureaucracy. I wish I hadn’t —“

“You can’t —“

“I wish I hadn’t pushed him to keep looking into the adoption scam.”

“Maybe if you told us a little more about the scam, about who was involved, we’d be able to find out who shot you.”

“I should tell homicide? I should tell the third-rate detectives who’ve already screwed up this case beyond belief?”

“Tell me.” 

“I can’t.”

“You can’t, or you won’t?”

“Both.”

“Attorney-client privilege?”

“Why would you say that?” He stammered a bit while asking the question. “This isn’t your case, anyway. It doesn’t matter.”

“Attorney-client privilege was Carisi’s first guess.”

“Not your case, not Carisi’s case.”

“Listen,” she said, returning to the bed and offering him a quick kiss, “don’t beat yourself up. I need you out of here so you can take me dancing.”

“Dancing. Sure.”

“You’re right, Rafa. It’s not my case. You need a friend, not another detective.” 

Still, she wondered who the client was. _Not your case,_ she reminded herself, or she tried to remind herself, as she promised Barba she'd be back soon.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Should I add, um, "post-laparotomy smut" to the tags?

Everyone was going to be home for Christmas: Benson and Fin were both taking three days’ vacation, with a sergeant from Brooklyn SVU sitting in. Rollins didn’t have to report back for desk duty until January 2nd, when she’d meet with some of the higher-ups about transferring to CSU, and Carisi had put in for a week-long vacation long before the incident(s) under the bridge. Barba was discharged from the rehab hospital on the Sunday before Christmas, after the longest 16 days of his life. Carvalho was out on bail, staying with his parents on the other side of the Hudson River for the holiday. Pending Jack McCoy’s approval, EADA Cutter, concerned about a possible Fourth Amendment violation, was unlikely to follow through with the charges against him. In that, there was at least a minor victory. 

Lucia asked Benson and Noah to have Christmas dinner with them. Benson accepted, despite her reservations about allowing Noah to become too (re-)attached to Barba. 

She was surprised when Barba showed up in her lobby at 8:30 on Christmas Eve. He and Calhoun had gone to visit the Carvalho family in New Jersey that morning, and, barely a day and a half out of the hospital, he must have been exhausted. 

In dress pants and a sport coat, and a blue-checkered shirt with the top two buttons undone, he looked almost like himself again. A little thinner, a few more rings under his eyes, but, only 17 days after a bullet had ripped through his spleen and lower intestine, he was way ahead of the recovery game. Carisi’s assessment seemed correct: Rafael Barba was far too much of a stubborn asshole to let himself die of a gunshot wound. 

There was a gift-wrapped box tucked under his arm. “Had to put this under the tree for Noah,” he said, a sweet, sheepish smile forming on his face. “You’re going to have paper and colored pencils all over the apartment for months. Don’t throw me out the window.”

“Thank you.” She kissed his lips, took the box from him and set it near the tree. “He’s asleep. Only night of the year I can get him to fall asleep before 9. He’ll be waking me up at 4 to open the presents, though. Where are you headed tonight?”

“Midnight mass. I promised Mami I’d go with her.”

“You look like you’re still so tired.”

“I am. But I slept the whole two hours we were stuck on the GWB, even through Rita’s incessant cursing.”

“I can’t believe you’re on your feet like this so soon. Tell Lucia to give you a break.”

“That I’m on my feet at all is enough of a miracle that mass is worth my time tonight,” he said.

“Rafael Barba, I never took you for one to talk about miracles.” She moved in closer and kissed him again. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“Me too.”

She moved her kisses over to his jawline, then down his neck. He smirked, clearly delighted, and wrapped an arm around her waist. With a slight stumble, he drew her flush against him, and slid one hand up her shirt. When he found nothing but bare skin underneath — she wasn’t expecting company — he laughed into her neck.

“Hey, now,” she warned as the pad of his thumb brushed her nipple, “if you want to go there, we’ve got to go into my bedroom and shut the door.”

“No kitchen table?” he joked as he followed her lead.

“Someday when we’re home alone,” she said, shuddering to herself when she realized how far into the future she’d absentmindedly projected. In the bedroom, she unbuttoned his shirt and tugged at his belt buckle. When she saw the bandages beneath his white undershirt, she withdrew her hands. 

“It’s fine,” he said, sliding his own hand into her pajama pants and between her legs.

“You just got out of the hospital. What are you allowed to do?”

“I don’t care if you pull apart all my stitches, baby.”

She laughed at the uncharacteristic term of endearment. “Seriously, I don’t want to send you back to the ER.”

“Liv, shh.”

When he had her out of her clothes, he slid down her body and focused on working her to climax with his lips and fingers. She wasn’t complaining — she definitely wasn’t complaining — but he remained reclining on one side, not seeking any pleasure for himself, which meant that even if he didn’t want to admit it, his physical activity was surely restricted. 

He was _focused_. She’d always liked that about him, but in this context, she especially liked that about him. 

“Rafa, what are you allowed to do?” she repeated when her breathing had steadied and his head was back on the pillow next to hers.

“My hospital papers say “sexual activity as tolerated.””

She touched him through his boxers, then started to lift up his undershirt, slowly, until it was over his head and finally discarded on the night table. White bandages covered the bullet wound and the surgical scar; smaller scars dotted his belly and the left side of his chest. “It’s not that bad,” Benson said, brushing the back of her hand over his right side. 

“I can’t — move — how I’d like to,” he admitted.

“It’s only been two and a half weeks. No pressure. Don’t move.” She pushed his underwear down and held him in the palm of her hand as she planted kisses down the side of his neck. “ _As tolerated._. Can you tolerate this?”

“I can.” His response was matter-of-fact, but his eyes closed and he swallowed reflexively. “Keep doing that.”

“I see now why you walk with that swagger in the courtroom.” That little bit of flattery took him far. She kissed his ear and whispered into it the rest of her fantasy about him in his office in his three-piece suit. “Yes, that’s it, sweetheart, sweetheart,” he said as he came, more than a little different from the string of curses she’d expected. 

There was this wonderful romantic side to him, and she wished she’d known it two or three years ago. Even as they were together now, in bed, his thumb drawing lazy circles on her arm, his wide green eyes staring into hers, she couldn’t quash the nagging sense that they were two years too late. 

She went into the bathroom to retrieve a package of wipes — he hadn’t brought along the shower shield for the bandages because he hadn’t expected to get, well, dirty — and when she returned, he was asleep. 

“Rafa,” she said, climbing into bed and nudging him gently. 

“Mmm, I need a nap.”

“You said you’d go to midnight mass with your mother.”

“Really, you have to bring up my mother now?” he said, his eyes still closed. “I just need a few minutes.”

“You’ve got half an hour. Ten o’clock gives you enough time to get uptown.”

“Mmm.”

“A cab will get you there in half an hour.”

“Subway.”

“Subways are running on a weekend schedule,” she said. “You’re cutting it too close.”

“No cabs.”

As much as Rafael Barba bragged about only needing Tylenol after a gunshot wound, when his guard was down, his trauma was apparent. 

He was fast asleep. 

She woke him up half an hour later. He grumbled, and she had to help him up — he still couldn’t stand from a fully reclined position without help — and said she’d call a neighborhood car service that she was familiar with. “The subway’s fine,” he said. “Even on a weekend schedule, I’ll make it.”

“You won’t, and I don’t think you should be on your feet so much, so soon after coming home from the hospital.”

“The doctors and nurses all said I shouldn’t be off my feet for more than two hours. I’ll be fine.”

“Rafa.” She took his arm and pulled him closer. Barefoot, they were eye-to-eye. “You forget, I know what it’s like.”

“You know what what’s like?”

“I’ll call for a car, and then you text me a picture of the license number and the TLC plaque as soon as you get in. I’ll stay on the phone with you the whole time if you’d like.”

“Please. I’m not seven years old.”

“You need to take a cab. Trust me?”

“Sure.” He let her call the car service, and when the car arrived, he sent her a text message apologizing for his reluctance to do things the easy way, promising her he’d call as soon as he got to his mother’s. She texted back and forth with him, asking him questions, knowing he’d feel better if he stayed in touch with her for the duration of the ride, even if he didn’t want to admit it. 

He called her as soon as he was upstairs. “Merry Christmas,” he said. “I love you.”

“I love you,” she said back, still trying to shake that feeling that they were two years too late. 

—

The call from Fin came in just after they’d cleared the plates away, when Lucia invited Noah in to help her with dessert. 

“Got a call from the higher-ups, one of the lieutenants directly under Dodds. You and me need to get to West 94th now.” 

“What’s going on?”

“DOA in that old church a block off Broadway. There’s no more congregation there, just a theater group that uses the building, and one of them came in tonight to get ready for a show tomorrow, found the guy on the stairs, pants down, signs of sexual assault, serious bruising.”

“Why can’t they ask Sergeant Barraza and the unis on duty to check it out?” she asked, bracing herself for the answer. 

“Because our DOA is Judge Jansen Marlowe. Judge Marlowe’s girlfriend is Lainey Gilberti, whose other loverboy, Bob Kessilton, reported her missing to the staties two days ago.”

“All right. Give me ten minutes.” She heard Noah laughing in the kitchen. “Actually, can you send two officers to pick me up? On the off-chance this is some kind of trap.”

“Done,” he said. “When the guys from the precinct up there told me what they found, I was thinking this could have been staged to get SVU on the scene.”

“It sounds crazy, but after what we’ve been though these last few years, we can’t rule it out. Let me call Rollins and have her get Noah for me.”

While Benson made arrangements with Rollins, Barba walked in to the living room and sat on the couch. Benson paced the floor, instructing Rollins to use her local car service (she had a car, but couldn’t steer well because of the heavy cast on her right hand) and keep her apprised of her location. 

“Liv,” Barba said suddenly, “don’t go.”

“Rollins will be here within the hour. Noah understands that I get called into work sometimes.”

“You’ve been set up to walk into traps before. I heard you on the phone. That’s what you think is happening here.”

“Other than Lewis, and years ago when a UC operation went wrong, I’ve never been “set up” to walk into a trap.”

“Other than those two times. And the three other times you walked into hostage situations, including the one where you came to me horrified because you’d told a victim to point a gun at you instead of the perpetrator.”

“Fin and I are prepared. This is an order from Dodds’ office. We have no senior detectives on duty and the victim is Judge Jansen Marlowe.”

“Matter for the state police, then,” he said brusquely, waving a hand in front of him.

“For a murder and sexual assault that took place in Manhattan.”

“Please.” He stood up slowly from the couch and squeezed her hand. “Please be careful.”

“I know what I’m doing. You’ll be all right with Noah for an hour?”

“Yes. Liv, these people are dangerous. Impulsive, stupid, but dangerous.”

“There are lots of people on the scene. This is my job.”

“I know.” He held her face in his hands and craned his neck slightly to kiss her. “I love you. I never meant to hurt you. I thought —“

“Don’t do that. I’ll be fine.”

“I thought it would hurt you more if I stayed in the city after my trial. I was burdening you with all the mistakes I made.” The words rolled out quickly. “You said _I have to fix this_ , and I thought —“

“Stop.”

They noticed Noah standing a foot away, watching them, worry and confusion spreading across his face.

“Is Uncle Rafa leaving again?” he asked.

“No, sweet boy, no,” Benson said, bending down to hug him. “I have to go to work tonight, and Aunt Amanda is going to pick you up so you can have a sleepover with her and Jesse. Would you like to stay and have dessert with Uncle Rafa and Lucia?”

“Okay,” he said, looking at his feet. 

“Noah,” Barba said, “I’m not leaving.”

When he walked her to the elevator a few minutes later, she asked him to do her a favor and please not make Noah any promises. “We’ll talk later,” was her promise to Barba. “We’ll work this out later.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is *mostly* procedural because I needed to move that plot forward in order to get to the next bit of angst. I'm building the procedural plot out one block at a time until I hit land, like the 59th Street Bridge, which is supposed to collapse any day now, so ;-)
> 
> All-out Barson eventually. Bear with me. Bear with me!

“We’ve got to get an ME down here. I don’t want to drag anybody else out on Christmas,” Fin said, “but this doesn’t look right. Are you with me?”

Benson nodded. “Postmortem bruising.”

“We can get the body to the MEs office, have it looked at first thing in the morning.” Sergeant Barraza, the Brooklyn SVU sergeant covering supervisory duties over the holiday, had no personal investment in the case, and apparently didn’t understand how important the Lainey Gilberti connection was.

“Don’t move the body,” Benson told him. “We can’t risk any more bruising. I’ve been around long enough to recognize a postmortem sexual assault, but I’m not a doctor, not an ME, so what I say won’t hold up in court. Do not touch him.”

“I’ll call Warner, see if she can send someone,” Fin said. “You think we’re dealing with a freak here or somebody who was trying to make sure SVU showed up?”

“All of the above,” Benson said.

“Lieutenant!” she heard an officer shout from somewhere above them, his voice echoing through the walls and ceiling of the onetime church. “We’ve got another vic!”

Benson cursed under her breath. “Your guys didn’t clear the entire building?” she asked Barraza. 

“I was sure we did.”

“Where’s the floor plan?” Barraza searched for an answer; Benson, furious that she’d been called in on Christmas night, that she’d had to scramble to make arrangements for Noah’s care, continued. “Cavernous 150-year-old building, and you didn’t think to do a quick Google search for a floor plan?”

“Sergeants, Lieutenant,” they heard over the radio, “this vic’s breathing. I called for a bus.”

“Come with me, Fin,” Benson said, and they started up the stairs together. 

One flight up, they found Lainey Gilberti unconscious in a stairwell. “Officers,” Benson said into her radio through gritted teeth, “search every single stairwell and get a floor plan of the building.” 

“You think there’s a third guy?” Fin said. “Or did they do this to each other?”

“How?” Benson asked, exasperated.

“We’ve been asking that question since Ms. Gilberti here first showed up on our radar.” Fin stopped to answer his phone, then told Benson, “Warner’s coming down herself.”

“You ruined everybody’s Christmas, Lainey,” Benson told the unconscious woman.

“She might be able to hear you.”

“You care about protecting the feelings of the lady who probably shot at least one of the victims in the car Barba was in, is probably responsible for Barba getting shot, and who definitely ruined Rollins’ career as a detective?”

When the paramedics took Lainey, Benson followed them to the hospital. She checked in with Rollins, who was home with her mother and the kids, and then Barba, who was relived that she hadn’t walked into yet another hostage situation. “I can’t say anything yet, but it’s going to be a long night,” she told him. 

— 

Carisi was stuck in traffic on the Verrazano Bridge at 10pm on Christmas night, fiddling with the radio, which was finally broadcasting non-Christmas songs again. His phone chirped. Glancing to his right, he saw the name “Roya Ibragimova” on the screen.

He quickly shoved the hands-free earpiece into his ear while keeping his left hand on the steering wheel. “Roya? What’s up?”

“I’m sorry to call you so late on your holiday.”

“It’s fine. I’m stuck in traffic on the longest bridge in North America. Talk to me.”

“You remember the baby in Battery Park City this summer, the little boy, six months old, it was all over the news?”

“You’re talking about the Munchausen by Proxy case. Yeah, that was me and my partner on that one. The parents got put a way for a long time.”

“One of the girls in Lefrak City, she’s very young, she did an adoption through that lady — Lainey? — and she thinks that was her baby. She’s not trying to get money, I swear, she’s only 16 and her parents never knew she was pregnant. For a while she thought she was crazy, she didn’t want to tell anyone what she was thinking, but I told her to let me ask someone.”

“All right, Roya, I know you work long hours, but is there any way you can bring this girl and one of her parents in to make a statement?”

“The parents didn’t know she was pregnant.”

“She’s a minor, so it’s harder for me to take her statement or run a DNA test if she doesn’t come in with one of her parents. I have to get the DA’s office on board, way too many people, way too much time, otherwise.”

“I’ll try. I’ll talk to her.”

“Please. This could help us.”

In early summer, SVU had been called into Mercy’s pediatrics ward by a doctor who strongly suspected a case of Munchausen by Proxy involving a couple who had supposedly lost their first two children to a rare genetic disorder. As the doctor had pointed out, the chances of their third child, who had been adopted, dying of the same genetic disorder were extremely slim. 

The couple had lived in New Jersey when their first child spent 6 months hospitalized and subsequently died. The state attorney general’s office had opened up an investigation, but never followed through, and the couple moved to Pennsylvania, where a similar situation had occurred with their second child. The investigation in Pennsylvania was still open. 

Back in June, Carisi had wanted to look into the circumstances of the adoption: how could the couple have adopted a baby in such a short time frame, while there was still an investigation open regarding their second child? But, those investigations were outside of SVU’s scope, outside of SVU’s jurisdiction, probably an interstate matter, Carisi had told himself. Now, seeing that if he’d pushed a little further, he could have blown open the adoption scam long before Barba and Carvalho got in too deep, he wanted to kick himself in the head.

—

“Lainey?”

Lainey Gilberti squinted at the sight of Benson crossing the hospital room to stand near the bed. She shuddered when she noticed that she was handcuffed to the bed rail. 

“Lainey,” Benson repeated. 

“Screw you.”

“I can get that restraint replaced with a fancy GPS.” 

“When I was 16, I helped my mom run card games for the mafia guys at her restaurant in Howard Beach, I mean, there was no mafia in Howard Beach, there was no mafia in general, but we ran card games for them even though they didn’t exist.”

“I need you to talk to me about Judge Marlowe.”

“All that’s left back home are these young guys who run their own shit, I’m sure you know all about it, they can’t even hold middle-management type positions anymore, it’s all gone. It used to be so much easier to bring in money. I don’t even know what this was Marlowe was running anymore. Tell me he’s dead.”

“What happened?”

“He was trying to kill me!”

“Why?”

“He needs a reason?”

“I’m trying to help you.”

“Yeah, you’re trying to help so you can help your boyfriend, right?”

“Was Marlowe sexually assaulted?” Benson asked.

“I couldn’t say.”

“The ME says the bruising on his genitals was postmortem. Were you trying to get SVU to come down, Lainey? Were you trying to help somebody? Were you trying to hurt somebody?”

“You really think I’m going to say something now?” she said, tugging at the restraint.

“Marlowe’s dead.” Benson hoped that information would assure Lainey that there were no further threats to her life if she talked. “If it was self-defense, we won’t add any more charges to what you already have.”

“I’ll ask my lawyer about that.”

For the sake of the case, Benson hoped that the lawyer she was referring to was the beloved-but-gullible Kessilton. 

Benson was starting to piece some of the timeline together: Carvalho had been investigating Kessilton only because Kessilton was a terrible lawyer who had his girlfriend steal cars to make him look like a hero when he “found” them, saving his reputation and Yelp ratings. When Carvalho discovered that the two of them were running an adoption scam, he asked Barba for help because of his experience with SVU. Somewhere else along the line, their investigation reached Marlowe.

She was willing to bet her pension that Marlowe, who’d been in a relationship with Lainey for years before she met Kessilton, was Lainey’s real partner-in-crime, and that Kessilton was just a gullible middle man; she’d bet her spacious two-bedroom Manhattan apartment that Marlowe happened to be one of Carvalho’s clients, which would explain Carvalho’s tight-lippedness. 

“Lieutenant,” Lainey said as Benson turned to leave, “speaking of lawyers —“

Benson kept her back turned. “Think carefully about what you’re going to say.”

“I know exactly what I’m saying. If we’re on the subject of lawyers, you might want talk to your old friend Trevor Langan.”


	9. Chapter 9

Even though neither of them was supposed to be working, Carisi and Benson showed up at SVU the day after Christmas to meet with Roya, along with the 16-year-old who’d confided in her that the Munchausen’s baby might have been her biological son, and the teenager’s father. Roya had convinced them both to come in; Carisi told Benson that after the new year, he was going to try to help Roya get a job with NYPD community relations. “She speaks five languages and might have saved our case,” Carisi said. “Not going to let her walk away from this empty-handed.”

If DNA showed that the baby had indeed been the 16-year-old’s biological son, then the Kessilton/Gilberti/Marlowe/god-knows-who-else adoption scam had resulted in a murder that was most definitely under SVU’s purview. It was exactly what they needed to get the case away from the homicide detectives who had screwed it up beyond belief.

Benson didn’t say anything to Carisi about Lainey Gilbert’s name-drop of Trevor Langan. She knew, in the pit of her stomach, in her long-seasoned detective gut, in her heart pounding warning signals against her ribcage, that something had gone very, very wrong. Langan, once Ellie Porter’s defense attorney, since her death Noah’s attorney, the man who’d pushed the adoption through without a good-faith investigation of whether the boy had any living blood relatives, the man who’d probably saved Noah’s life, might have been an intermediary in an adoption scam. 

She couldn’t reach Langan. A paralegal at his firm said that he’d gone on vacation two weeks ago, was supposed to return for a few days before Christmas, but hadn’t come back to the office. The paralegal assumed that he’d extended his vacation, not unusual for a senior partner this time of year, but she did note that she couldn’t reach him at home or on his personal cellphone either. 

“Report him missing,” Benson said. “Now.”

Was it possible that Langan, one of the best and brightest defense attorneys in New York City, who all the ADAs she’d worked with had hated to go up against, was another middleman in Marlowe’s scam, just like the gullible idiot Kessilton? Or maybe he’d been sucked in like Carvalho, through attorney-client privilege. 

A few years ago, Marlowe had been investigated and cleared in a bribery scandal. The CEO of a non-regulated childcare app was fined and told to cease operations in New York State immediately; the company’s lawyers took their case to the state appeals court. One judge on the appeals court was impeached when it was discovered that she’d accepted a bribe in exchange for her promise to allow the company to continue operating in New York. Marlowe was also investigated for accepting bribes in the lower courts and for acting as a middleman himself, between the CEO and the appeals court.

Carvalho had been Marlowe’s attorney. 

Carvalho got him cleared of all charges. Marlowe paid him an advance retainer. Technically, Carvalho was still on retainer for Marlowe. 

“Speaking as a guy who’s technically a lawyer,” Carisi told Benson, “all I can say is Carvalho’s hands are tied. He can either violate attorney-client privilege, which would get him sanctioned by the New York Bar and the ABA, and would mean whatever he tells us is inadmissible anyway, or —“

“Or he could use the crime-fraud exception, in which case what he tells us would be admissible,” Benson said. 

“Right. And then he’d have to either take a plea and do jail time — they could get him on conspiracy to commit murder — or go through a trial. The Attorney General would file charges against him, too, and if any of the adoptions were interstate, he’s screwed.”

“No, we can’t put him through that.” She reminded herself to call Rollins again to check in on Noah. She’d called once an hour. 

She couldn’t let McCoy do to Carvalho what he’d done to Barba, but she also needed assurance that no court of law could take Noah away from her.

After a very long morning, she called Barba. “Do you know about Marlowe?” she asked.

“I’m on my way to have lunch with Andy now.”

“Do not tell him anything I’m about to tell you.”

“You have my word.”

“First, the adoption scam is connected to a murder that Carisi and Rollins investigated this summer, so the case is ours now.”

“It’s still a matter for the state police and the Attorney General overall. Please don’t get McCoy any more involved in this than he needs to be.”

“The reason your friend Carvalho has been keeping his mouth shut is attorney-client privilege. Marlowe had him on advance retainer, as if he knew what he was doing. Judge Marlowe was killed last night.”

“I knew Marlowe was his client. He never told me that he suspected Marlowe was involved. That must be why he wanted to stop investigating the scam. I told you, this is my fault, I told him to keep pushing forward.”

“At least one infant died as a result, so there may have been others who were placed with families they shouldn’t have been placed with. On that, you did right, Rafa. But, listen, I need you to answer my next question honestly.” She drew in a breath, preparing for the sense of betrayal that might hit her. “Did you know that Trevor Langan was involved?”

“Langan?” She could _hear_ Barba’s mouth go dry on the other end of the phone. “If I’d heard that name in connection with Kessilton, Gilberti, anybody, I would have called you right away. I swear on my life. There were ten or twelve lawyers, we don’t know exactly how many, acting as middlemen, keeping 20% and passing the rest on to the guy running the scam, Marlowe, as it turns out. That was what we were going to tell the Attorney General.”

“Langan’s assistant can’t find him, and last night, Lainey said I should “talk to my friend Trevor Langan.” Not a word of this to Carvalho, you hear me?”

“I hear you. Liv, listen to me. Until Langan is located and cleared, I am Noah’s attorney of record.” He pushed the words out forcefully, quickly. “Do you agree to that arrangement?”

“Yes.”

“It’s going to be okay,” he assured her.

“I don’t know. These last couple of years —“

“We’ll locate Langan, you and Noah will be fine. Can I bring dinner tonight?”

“You haven’t even been out of the hospital a week, Rafa.”

“Don’t worry.”

“But you’re still so tired —“

“I meant don’t worry about Noah. Sheila Porter has no rights to him. She’s a non-custodial grandparent who kidnapped her grandson and injured his mother. Do not worry. Even if Langan was involved with the scam, they can’t touch Noah.”

“Okay.” She tried to maintain a clear, steady voice. “Come over tonight.”

—

“So,” Barba said, sliding into a high-backed booth at the Upper West Side diner where he’d met Carvalho for lunch, “the client in your attorney-client privilege dilemma was Judge Marlowe.”

“Swidler is first semester 1L. You’re smarter than that.” Carvalho was referring to a Supreme Court decision that meant he had to maintain attorney-client privilege even though Marlowe was dead.

“No crime-fraud exception?”

“Crime-fraud.” Carvalho clinked his coffee cup against the surface of the table. “Is that what your NYPD paramour thinks?”

“What does yours think?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Barba smacked his lips as he downed the rest of his lukewarm coffee. “Neither do I,” he asserted, a small smirk forming at the corner of his mouth.

“Rafael.”

“If I were the prosecutor here, I would argue crime-fraud on the basis that Marlowe’s keeping you on retainer constituted participation in the adoption scam.”

“Not knowingly.”

“A baby was given, pretty much sold, to a couple with Munchausen by Proxy who would have been rejected in every other scenario.”

“How do you know about that?’ Carvalho asked.

“How do you?”

An impasse, again. “NYPD won’t know if that baby really was acquired through the scam until they get the DNA results,” Carvalho said. “So, crime-fraud. You’d have me tried and put in jail for something I didn’t know was connected to what we were investigating?”

“How could you have worked so closely with Marlowe, representing him in the bribery scandal, and not have known?”

Carvalho’s face fell. “You’ve got to trust me.”

“I do. I pulled for you when homicide and the DAs office decided to shit all over probable cause and have you arraigned.”

“Everyone involved, everyone, seems to have trusted Marlowe and Kessilton to the ends of the earth, but me, I’m the one who gets thrown in Rikers, I’m the one who’s spending my Christmas holiday waiting for other shoe to drop, waiting to see if your asshole Manhattan DA is going to charge me or not.”

 _I’ve been there_ , Barba thought, waving down the waiter for more coffee.

“I feel complicit,” Carvalho said, laying his hands flat on the table, “in my rotten defense attorney soul, I feel complicit, but that doesn’t mean the crime-fraud exception applies.”

_Do you feel guilty, sir?_

He understood.

—

Barba picked up dinner from an Italian restaurant a few blocks down from Benson’s apartment. Just as they were sitting down to eat at Benson’s dining table, Melinda Warner called. Benson went into the bedroom. 

“We had a DNA hit,” Warner said flatly.

Benson’s heart skipped a beat. If the DNA “hit” was about the Munchausen case, Warner would have emailed Carisi. Besides, it was way too soon for those results to have come through.

She’d received this sort of call from Warner once before. 

Bracing herself, she sat on the bed. “Melinda?”

She heard Warner let out a long breath. “My office ran Lainey Gilberti’s DNA a few weeks ago because her last car theft charge was from before we regularly ran DNA, and we needed it in case a weapon was recovered. We had a hit in CODIS for a familial match with Johnny Drake. I’m sorry, Liv, I checked, I checked again, and Lainey Gilberti and Johnny Drake have the same mother.”

“What? That —“

“I will not say anything. The problem is, it’s in CODIS now.” 

“Thank you for letting me know.” She choked the words out, stood, and then threw her phone down on the bed, suppressing the scream forming at the back of her throat. “Rafa!” she called. “Rafa!”

“Everything’s okay, Noah,” she added. “Everything’s okay, I just need to talk to Uncle Rafa for one minute.”

Barba stumbled into the room, clutching his side. He must have leapt up and ran, forgetting his injuries. 

With wide eyes, he took both of her hands in his. 

“That man, Trevor Langan, he, he,” she said, unable to catch her breath. 

Barba squeezed her hands. “Tell me.”

“Warner ran Lainey Gilberti’s DNA. She’s Johnny D’s sister. She’s Noah’s aunt, and I’ll bet she knows it, she must know it, otherwise she wouldn’t have brought up Langan. Somebody better find Langan so I can kill him myself. She _knows_ , that’s why she brought him up, she knows, but Langan was trying to save Noah’s life, so he lied, he lied, he —“

“Mom?” Noah called from the living room. 

“One minute, honey.” Her eyes were dry. All that was in her throat, in her belly, in the hollows of her veins and arteries, was fear.

Barba’s lips were twitching. “Like we said, I am Noah’s attorney of record now. I will not let anyone challenge the adoption.”

“What do we do?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Right now, the smartest thing for us to do from a legal point of view is nothing. If there’s a possibility that Lainey’s connected to Langan but doesn’t know about Noah, if someone else told her to mention Langan to you, if she has no interest in custody, we don’t want to turn over any new rocks here.”


	10. Chapter 10

“I’m not bailing her out again.” Kessilton straightened out his puffy winter parka and squinted through the glass that allowed him and Carisi to see into the interrogation room. He’d been at SVU for half an hour and still hadn’t taken off that stupid coat. Lainey sat across from Carisa Mejias, a homicide detective from outside the precinct who Dodds had assigned to oversee the murder case. “For all I know,” Kessilton said, pointing a stubby finger at the glass, “Lainey shot that driver herself.”

“Since you’re still her attorney, it’s probably unwise to say that.” Carisi folded his arms. 14 hours in the precinct already, on a day when he was supposed to be off.

“I admit to killing Marlowe, but I told you, it was self-defense, he brought me there to kill me,” Lainey was saying. “He beat me up. He had his hands around my throat. He said he was going to get found out because I stole the ambulance and broke that detective’s hand. I pushed him down the stairs, pulled his pants down, beat him up a little so the SVU guys, the ones who knew what they were doing — no offense — would come down.”

“Hey, Mr. Kessilton, your client’s confessing that she went a little beyond self-defense,” Carisi said. “If I were you, I’d go in there and at the very least tell her to keep her mouth shut until she gets a new attorney.”

Kessilton shrugged. “I still think she might have shot the driver.”

As Kessilton went into the interrogation room, Carisi turned around and leaned his whole body into the wall behind him, wondering how someone so _stupid_ could make it so far as an attorney, as a beloved community member. He spotted Carvalho coming in through the main door up front, so he quickly switched off the two way mirror and the audio connection. Detective Mejias, thankfully, seemed to be more competent than any other homicide detective they’d dealt with in the last three weeks.

“Can we talk outside?” Carvalho asked.

“Sure.” Carisi picked up his coat and followed Carvalho into the elevator. 

On the sidewalk outside the precinct, Carvalho lit a cigarette. “Sorry,” he said, waving the smoke from Carisi’s face. “I quit eight years ago, right before my 40th birthday. So much for that.”

“What happened? You heard from the DAs office?”

“No. I will soon. My attorney, Daniella Sasson, a senior partner at my firm, is driving down first thing tomorrow morning. I’m going to take the crime-fraud exception and talk to NYPD and the DA.”

“You can’t do that. Don’t let Cutter or anybody convince you —“

“It’s my decision. I need to.” His eyes were turning red. “I got a phone call before, from somebody else involved with Marlowe — I can’t say too much, obviously — but this is bad. I should have talked to the Attorney General months ago. This is bad, Sonny. An infant is dead, you know about that, that was your case, but at least one adoption’s in trouble because I didn’t speak up.”

“How bad?”

“Bad. You’ll see.”

“What about Rita Calhoun? Can she come down tonight, and then maybe —“

“Rita’s skiing somewhere outside Montreal. I never understood her and Rafael’s penchant for sliding down hills at 60 miles an hour.” He took another drag on his cigarette, rubbed his eyes with his free hand, and looked up at the starless lower-Midtown night sky. “And I’m sorry, Sonny, I know you were looking for a lot less than somebody smoking and crying while he talks about taking the crime-fraud exception.”

“It’s all right.” Carisi tentatively laid an open hand on Carvalho’s back, over his coat. “It’ll be all right. You and your colleague know what you’re doing.”

“I might go to jail, or at least get put through a long trial, given what they did to Rafael.”

“You staying in Jersey, or —“

“You’re the lead detective on the SVU side of the case,” Carvalho reminded him. He was half-smiling now. “I’m staying in Jersey tonight.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” 

“Yes. Maybe Monday. Daniella and I have to figure out the best way to approach this.”

—

At one in the morning, Benson was still awake, laying on her side when Barba, who’d been sleeping silently, rolled over and slung an arm around her. He kissed a patch of skin that her T-shirt had exposed near her neck. “Have you slept?” he mumbled into her hair. 

“No.” Her body ached. “I can’t sleep until I know Noah’s safe.”

“I give it 50/50 that if we do nothing, Gilberti also does nothing.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“What does she get out of the deal other than custody of Noah? She’s already going to jail for assaulting a police officer and for trying to steal an ambulance. And even if Marlowe’s death is ruled self-defense, Lainey’s almost certainly going to get at least five more years, no matter what she tries to say or do, for her involvement with Marlowe’s scam. All she’d get out of challenging your adoption of Noah is custody of a 6-year-old who’d be sent straight to foster care while she does 5 to 15 years.”

“Look at what happened the night you were shot,” she said, slowly turning over so that she was facing him. “We’ve seen how quickly she resorts to sabotage when she doesn’t get her way.”

“If Lainey brings up Noah in interrogation,” he said, “if she decides to do that, you call me, you have your detectives call me. I am his attorney, I will represent his interests.”

Benson squeezed her eyes shut. They were still painfully dry. Every muscle in her face spasmed. 

“You have to get back to your clients in Albany.”

“I can stay until you re-interrogate Lainey.”

“Carisi’s got her in interrogation tonight.”

“It’s going to take a few tries, though, isn’t it? Besides, I’m looking for work here.”

“Why?”

“You?” he said, phrasing his response as a question.

“If you need to be far away from the things that broke you, I understand. Don’t make your life more difficult on my account.”

“In the message I left you in May, that’s what I said, that for a while, I needed to get away, I needed to re-orient my moral compass. I didn’t mean for you to think that I was leaving because you’d changed me. Mostly I wanted to make sure you were all right after —“

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I love you, Liv,” he said, stroking her hair. “You know I’ll do whatever I have to do for you and Noah.”

“Stay and fight?”

“Yes. Always.”

“You did a great job of that back in February,” she said, opening her eyes to look directly at him. 

He pursed his lips. She could see the disappointment in his sad, sloping eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That wasn’t fair. You just spent more than two weeks in the hospital. I’m not going to give you a hard time.”

“It’s fair. I was selfish. And if I had known there was any connection between Gilberti and Langan, if I had known —“

“You didn’t. It’s too late. It’s too late for everything.”

“No, no.” His voice dropped on the second _no_. “Talk to me, please. Tell me what I can do.”

“You _left_ , I thought I was getting a declaration of love from you, and you left. I keep thinking that you and I must have screwed up a really good thing, not now, but two years ago. Maybe when Tucker and I ended it, I should have told you I wanted to be with you, screw all conflicts of interest. Or before that, when I first saw that there was something between us. I love you, but you _left_ , which is fine, if that’s what you needed to do, but you _left_.”

“I made a lot of mistakes last year.”

“I know, but we’re too late.”

“What if,” he said, interrupting his own thought with a kiss, “what if we are exactly on time?”

“Wouldn’t that be nice.”

He hugged her to his chest, stitches-be-damned. “Don’t worry about Lainey Gilberti, or Langan. You’ll get through this. You and Noah will be safe.” As he continued to reassure her, she drifted off into a dreamless sleep, hearing him repeat “we are exactly on time” once more. 

The gap between “exactly on time,” “just in time,” and “too late” was a narrow one.

A few hours later, the bedroom was still pitch-black, and Benson awakened to the sound of Barba saying “No. No. No.” He was asleep, his chest rising and falling quickly, the rest of his body frozen in place. When he opened his eyes, a slight whimper escaped his lips. “I’m — I’m guilty — I’m done — is it over?” he said, more to the ceiling than to Benson.

Benson lifted her head and gently rubbed Barba’s shoulder. “Rafa, it’s Liv, it’s three in the morning, you’re okay, you’re in my bed, you’re safe.”

He sucked in a breath through his nose. “I know where I am. I’m fine.”

“You want me to turn on the lights?”

“I’m fine.” 

“Okay.” She left a kiss on his shoulder. “You let me know what you need.”

“Come here, come here.” He wrapped his arms around her and drew her to him. “Stay with me.”

“Were you having a nightmare about —“

“It’s not what you think. The car, getting shot, I don’t dream about that at all. I don’t remember it. I still have nightmares about — about — the Householders.” He was stammering. “There’s a therapist upstate, I go once a week, she taught me how to get through it. I’ll be fine.”

“Honey, look at me.” The term of endearment slid off her tongue. She tilted her head. “I’ve been there. I told you.”

“You never flushed both your career and your soul down the toilet in one night.”

“I have not heard anything about your soul clogging any toilets anywhere.”

“Would that have come over the police dispatch?”

She slid a hand beneath his undershirt, carefully avoiding the bandages, and drew circles with her fingers in a spot just below his heart, as if his soul was an organ nestled amongst the others that had survived the shooting. “It’s right where it should be.”


	11. Chapter 11

After an evening in interrogation with Lainey Gilberti, who insisted again and again that she hadn’t shot the driver, and that Marlowe, who was swear-to-God under the bridge with her that night, was the one who’d shot him, Carisi and Mejias pieced together a plausible theory. The rideshare driver had been hired to kill Carvalho — he wasn’t a professional hitman, just a 23-year-old in serious debt — but shot Barba instead. 

There had definitely been a mixup: the driver had sent a text message to a burner phone asking _the shorter one right_ and had never received a response. Marlowe, who’d been watching (or possibly Lainey, if she was lying) must have killed the driver in retaliation for his error. 

The reason that this theory was so plausible was that the rideshare service, HLC, shared investors and board members with the childcare app involved in the bribery scandal that had originally connected Carvalho to Marlowe. 

“The only person who can reliably give us that connection is Carvalho,” Benson told Carisi when they were in her office on Friday afternoon. 

“What about Lainey?”

“I said “reliably.” Go home, Carisi, please. We’re going to need you to track down every adoption that went through every lawyer working for Marlowe. I’m going to put Rollins on it too when she comes back.” Dodds wanted to wait until Rollins’ second surgery was over before he transferred her to forensics, so SVU had her on desk duty until at least March. “We need to handle this carefully so we don’t challenge any adoptions where the parents didn’t know they were doing anything wrong.”

“But we also don’t want a repeat of the Muchausen’s case.”

“I agree, but —“

“Lieu, you adopted from foster care. This doesn’t affect Noah.”

“I can’t talk about this right now.”

“I’m going to tread very lightly, maybe cross-check child abuse cases with the names of the parents who were Marlowe’s highest bidders.”

“Good thinking. Now go home.”

“Yeah. See you Monday.” Hanging his head slightly, he walked out of Benson’s office and into the squadroom, almost bumping into Barba. Only three weeks after losing his spleen and part of his intestinal tract to a gunshot wound, Rafael Barba was in the SVU squadroom wearing his three-piece gray wool suit, a tie checkered with at least four shades of violet and blue, and his long tan coat. “Like old times!” Carisi said.

“Go get some sleep, Detective, you look terrible,” Barba said.

“ _Just_ like old times.”

Barba rolled his eyes and headed for Benson’s office.

Initially concerned that he might have to appear in court because of Carvalho’s arrest, he’d asked an associate to ship one of his suits to his mother’s place two weeks earlier, when he was still at Mercy. Of course, of all the suits he owned, the associate had to choose the gray wool one, the one which had figured prominently in the fantasy Benson had shared with him. It could have been worse: he could have sent over a summertime-only ensemble. 

When he walked into Benson’s office, she but her lip, at least seventeen emotions crossing her face at once. “Lainey still in interrogation?” he asked.

“Back at Rikers,” Benson said. “We’ll see her again Monday. What are you doing here?”

“Where’s Noah?”

“With Lucy, at Rollins’ place.”

“Rollins knows what’s going on?”

“For Noah’s safety, I apprised Rollins of the situation.”

“Carvalho’s coming in today with his own attorney to plead crime-fraud exception,” Barba told her. “That’s why I’m here.”

“Carvalho can help us. He can help the Attorney General, too. He’s the connection between the childcare app from Marlowe’s bribery scandal and the rideshare app that you and him used the night you were shot.”

“It’s not going to help when he brings up Langan. When they talk, I need to sit in and represent Noah’s interests.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to ask Andy to hold off until Monday, to give us a chance to locate Langan first.”

“So Carvalho did know that Langan was involved.”

“Yes, but until 48 hours ago, he didn’t know that Langan was Noah’s attorney.” Barba closed the space between them, glanced over to make sure the blinds were closed, and embraced her. “How are you feeling? You had a rough night.”

“This is a mess.” She leaned forward and pressed her forehead into his jacket. After at least a minute had passed and she very nearly dozed off standing up, she said, “Nice suit.” 

“Wasn’t on purpose,” he said. “I asked my associate to send me a suit. This is what he chose.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“I don’t lie to you, Liv.” He had his arms around her waist now, and they were swaying, exhausted, almost dancing, but exhausted. There was a knock on Benson’s door. 

“Carvalho’s here with his lawyer,” Fin said from outside.

Barba removed his coat and hung it over the chair in front of Benson’s desk. He peeked through the blinds. “Daniella Sasson. My boss.”

They went back out into the squadroom to greet their guests. “Detective Mejias and I are ready for you in Interview 1,” Fin said.

“What are you doing here?” Sasson asked, eyeing Barba.

“I’ll be sitting in.”

“Why?”

“Come with me.” They followed Barba down the hall, with Benson trailing them. In the hallway outside the interview room, Barba lowered his voice. “I would prefer we do this on Monday, after the police have had more time to locate Trevor Langan.”

“Stay out of it, Rafael,” Sasson warned.

Carvalho touched her shoulder. “He has good reason to be here,” he said.

“We need to be very careful about who we talk to.”

“I am representing Noah Porter Benson’s interests until we can locate Langan,” Barba said. “On behalf of my client, I request that we give the police the weekend to find him.”

“I’m not planning to disclose anything further than —“ Carvalho started to say. 

“Stop talking,” Sasson and Barba said at the same time.

“All we need from him is the link between Marlowe, the app involved in the bribery case, and the rideshare app,” Benson said. “Nothing else.”

“He’s pleading crime-fraud as it is, so he’ll give you all the attorneys in the adoption scam if your DA and the Attorney General don’t do anything stupid,” Sasson promised. “So there’s no reason for your “nothing else,” lieutenant.”

“He’ll give us all the attorneys,” Fin said, nudging Benson. “That’s what we need.”

“Maybe,” she said, holding both hands out in front of her, “maybe I shouldn’t be here.” She’d nearly turned down Carvalho’s offer to give up all the attorneys acting as middlemen in Marlowe’s scam. But, she thought, looking over at Barba, Noah deserved better than the hand he’d been dealt. The last thing her son needed in his life was Johnny D’s sister, the woman responsible for nearly killing his Uncle Rafa, the woman who’d ended his Aunt Amanda’s career as a detective, claiming that she was his blood relative, just like Sheila, and demanding visitation, or worse, custody. The last thing he needed was his adoption put in jeopardy after more than four years on account of adults who’d screwed up.

Sasson’s eyes narrowed. “In the best interest of Mr. Barba’s child client, then, I agree we should move this to Monday.”

Carvalho nodded in Benson’s direction. 

As the others returned to the squadroom, Benson hung back with Carvalho. “Tell me,” she said, keeping her voice low, “does Lainey know?”

“I can’t talk without Daniella present.”

“Please, for my son, does Lainey know she’s his blood relative?”

Carvalho looked at his feet. “I’m fairly sure she does.”

He caught up to Sasson, Barba, and Fin. Benson leaned against the wall and shut her eyes tight.

— 

On Friday night, Benson slept alone, waking up once an hour because, with Langan missing and Lainey Gilberti most likely aware that she was Noah’s aunt, her body wouldn’t let her rest. On Saturday, Barba came over with dinner prepared by his mother.

“That was very generous of her,” Benson said.

“She told me you were there for her when I was in the ICU.”

“How sweet.”

Barba peeked around the corner to make sure that Noah was still in his room. “She also asked if we were sleeping together yet.”

Amidst exhaustion and worry, Lucia’s comment gave her a good laugh. “Your mother is very invested, isn’t she?”

“I think she’s been a fan of us — you and me, together — for a long time and was more disappointed in me for leaving you than she was with me for how I dealt with the Householders.”

“Very, very invested,” Benson said.

She let Noah stay up until almost 10 and then put him to bed. When she came out of his room she found Barba on the couch, half-asleep, watching TV. She was wide awake.

“My nerves are fried,” she admitted.

He turned off the TV and stood with her. “Try to sleep, okay?”

“I can’t.” She leaned towards him. “What’s going to happen when we talk to Lainey on Monday? What’s going to happen when Carvalho names Langan as one of the attorneys?”

“Don’t worry about that now.”

“How can I not worry?”

“There’s nothing we can do before Monday.”

“Do you realize this is the _third time_ I’m coming way too close to losing my son — the _third time_ — because a superstar defense attorney cut corners?”

“Langan saved his life. You said so yourself.”

“I can’t. I can’t go through this again.” She grabbed her phone and headed for the bedroom. “I’ll try to sleep. I will.”

Barba went to the bathroom to check and clean his bandages. When he returned, he found Benson still awake, browsing her phone in the dark. “We could go to Brazil, or France, or Saint Helena, the remote island Napoleon was exiled to.”

He climbed in to bed and nuzzled up next to her. “You know you’d go to the most remote island in the word and Manhattan SVU cases would still find you.”

“Manhattan SVU cases connected to my son, my partner, my mother, my father’s family … I’m so tired, Rafa.”

“I know.” They were both lying on their sides, facing the wall. He kissed the back of her neck through her hair. “Try to sleep.”

“Tired, I mean … _tired_. I want to retire and consult for a lab or a PI.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“The last ten years have been exhausting.” Ten years, and the only time she’d been able to stop to take a breath, to celebrate, was the day when Noah’s adoption went through, when the courts legally recognized her as his mother. 

“Sleep.”

“I can’t.”

He ran a hand down her right side, over her ribcage, her hip, and then dipped his fingers under the waistline of her pajama pants. “How’s that?” he prompted.

“Better than reading a book,” she said, rocking back against him. Underneath the covers, she started to wriggle out of her pajama pants. She felt him laugh against her back. 

“Will that help you sleep?”

“Maybe. This works for you? With your injuries, I mean.”

“I’ll let you know if any more internal organs fall out.”

He muttered a few platitudes about how good she felt into her ear. Nothing she hadn’t heard before, but she loved the way he talked through gritted teeth when he was aroused. 

“Hey,” she said, catching her breath, “I can’t get pregnant, but do we need —“

“Up to you, but it’s been two years.”

“Two years?”

“No comment.”

Minutes later, he was inside her, and his thumb and a wave of pleasure hit her exhausted body at exactly the right time. He was still going. He moaned into her ear and whispered, “When I’m a hundred percent recovered, Liv, sweetheart, I can’t wait to bend y—“

He was interrupted by the downstairs doorbell buzzing.

They both froze, still attached, not moving.

The doorbell buzzed again. 

“Fuck,” Barba whispered.

“I know,” Benson said.

“That — that’s got to be a mistake, the doorbell ringing for someone else, right?”

“I need to check.”

“Yes. You do.” He pulled out and rolled to the other side of the bed. Benson turned on the television in the living room and switched it to the channel connected to the CCTV in the lobby.

“It’s Langan,” she whispered loudly. 

Barba, now in a white T-shirt and pajama pants, still uncomfortably and awkwardly erect, limped into the living room. “Langan. At 11:30 at night.”

“As a precaution, I’m going to load my weapon in case there’s anyone with him.”

“First, please don’t talk about loaded weapons, and second, don’t mention Lainey unless he broaches the topic. I need to hide in the bedroom. I’ll advise from there if I need to.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Not. Your. Fault,” he said, punctuating each word sharply. 

“Loaded weapons,” she said with a laugh, a little relieved to be able to make light of a situation that was tense for at least three — maybe four — or five — reasons. She loaded her service pistol, buzzed Langan up, and set an alarm on her phone reminding her to unload as soon as Langan left. 

Noah had at least two living blood relatives: Sheila Porter, the grandmother who had kidnapped him, and Lainey Gilberti, the sister of his violent biological father, herself a criminal, specifically a criminal who knew how to make money off the private adoption market. 

But Noah had been adopted from foster care. Because his closest blood relatives hadn’t given up their rights to him (Sheila Porter had only done so as part of a plea deal up in New Hampshire, and Benson wasn’t sure how much ethical water that deal held anyway), her legal status as Noah’s mother was very likely invalid. 

“Trevor,” she said, opening the door for him and checking the hallway.

“I’m alone,” he said. “And I am not Jansen Marlowe.”

Langan wore a T-shirt and jeans underneath a black peacoat that he’d left open, with no regard for the below-freezing temperatures outside. His full, unkempt beard suggested that he hadn’t shaved in over a week.

“Come in.” She went over to the counter and unloaded the pistol. 

“Jesus. I’m not one of them, Olivia.”

“That’s why I’m not pointing it at you. How long have you been working for Marlowe?”

“Marlowe’s really dead, right? That wasn’t a ruse to get me and the other attorneys out of hiding? After what happened with Barba, I knew I was in danger.”

“I saw Marlowe with my own eyes.”

“Dead?”

“Yes. How long were you working for him?”

“Since January. Almost a year.”

“After Sheila Porter.”

“I was blackmailed. Noah is my client, and I swore to Ellie Porter I’d protect him.”

“Until this is resolved, Rafael Barba is Noah’s attorney of record.”

“Barba? The Baby-Killer ADA?”

“That’s cruel. You’re better than that, Trevor. Or maybe not.”

Langan squinted in the direction of the closed bedroom door. “Oh.”

“You’ve got 60 seconds to explain yourself, or I’m radioing for a squad car and having you arrested.”

“You don’t have probable cause,” Barba called from inside the bedroom.

“Really?” Benson said with as much of an eyeroll as she could muster.

“He’s a Harvard-educated attorney. It’s a reflex. A Constitutional reflex.”

“60 seconds,” Benson repeated.

“A few weeks after Sheila took the plea, I was contacted by Lainey. I had the DNA run privately to confirm her story. She said that if I didn’t act as a middleman for her — they needed trustworthy attorneys to make the scam work — she’d come forward and Noah’s adoption would be overturned.”

“Because you didn’t do a good-faith investigation into whether Noah had any living family members.”

“I was trying to save his life.”

“Okay.” She clenched her jaw, fighting the outrage that was about to overtake her. “Go home, I’ll send you home with a detail if you want —“

“Don’t. You’ll have to justify that to your boss, and then the circumstances of my involvement will come out. Besides, Marlowe was the real threat, and he’s gone.”

“There were multiple other adoptions, so the _circumstances of your involvement_ are coming out no matter what.”

“I did a full background check on all the high bidders. I can’t say whether any of the other attorneys did, but —“

“The high bidders. How could you?”

“For Noah,” he asserted. “I was being blackmailed.”

“You’re going to come in on Monday, disclose everything, and Detective Carisi is going to arrest you.”

“Barba can argue it’s in Noah’s best interest —“

“Go home.”

Langan started to button his coat. “I didn’t know —“

“You didn’t do a good-faith investigation when Noah was a baby, and now you’re screwed.” She led Langan out the door. “I hope Noah’s fate is better.”

Barba emerged from the bedroom as soon as Langan left. “Liv,” he said, standing next to her at the counter, “a kid whose only living relatives are a grandmother who tried to kidnap him following an apparent psychotic break and a jailed car thief responsible for at least two murders would be put in foster care. There’s got to be some equivalent of inevitable discovery in family law.”

“But then the adoption wouldn’t have gone through. You know that. And God knows how many other blood relatives Noah has out there.”

He ran a hand up and down her back. “There’s supposed to be an inch of snow on the ground tomorrow,” he said, “Why don’t we take Noah for pancakes and then to the park, and why don’t we wait until Monday to worry about Monday?”

She turned to embrace him. “I’m sorry — about — before —“

“I’ll live.”

“You really want to spend your Sunday morning with a 6-year-old?”

“With Noah, yes.”

“Why, because you see colors now? Blues and greens and so on?”

“Shut up,” he teased, kissing a spot on her cheek just beneath her eye.

“You realize how stupid that sounded.”

“In retrospect.”

“You were supposed to end that speech with a kiss and —“

He kissed her lips, holding her tighter. “And a promise to stay in your life.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tagged: MORE CRYING.

When Benson walked out of the bathroom at her and Noah’s favorite Midtown diner, two unexpected sights came into view: first, Jack McCoy, or someone who looked remarkably like him, was drinking coffee and reading a newspaper approximately ten booths down from where she stood; second, Noah sitting next to Barba in the booth where they’d been eating breakfast, propped up on one foot and one knee so that his and Barba’s shoulders were touching. Noah was negotiating for more pancake syrup. Barba, a Harvard-educated attorney with 21 years in the DAs office and almost 11 months with a top Albany firm, was losing the negotiation. 

“McCoy, nine o’clock,” Benson said, sliding back into her seat.

Barba looked in the opposite direction.

“Nine o’clock with you as twelve o’clock.”

Barba looked past Noah, towards the window next to their booth. 

“Clockwise,” the 6-year-old corrected him. 

Barba glanced quickly at McCoy, then back at Benson. “That’s him.”

“Clockwise is in the direction of a clock, Uncle Rafa. It’s easy.”

“I’m your best chance at getting more pancake syrup,” Barba reminded him. 

“You want to come sit next to me again?” Benson asked her son.

“No. My pancakes are here now.”

“All right, then.” Benson leaned across the table. “I thought he lived on the Upper East Side.”

“He does. Rumors are he’s separated from wife number two.”

“Really.”

“People — including her — have supposedly been very unhappy with some of the decisions he’s made the last few years. Personal, political, I don’t know, I’m just telling you what I’m hearing from 120 miles up the Thruway.”

“He’s coming this way.”

“Great.” He punctuated the “t” to make sure that Benson knew just how thrilled he was to see McCoy. “This makes my Sunday.”

McCoy approached their table and flashed a wide smile. “Rafael, I thought that was you.” He nodded at Benson. “Lieutenant Benson.” 

“Mr. McCoy,” she said, forcing a smile of her own. “This is my son, Noah.”

“Noah, I think I last saw you when you were a toddler. How old are you now, 35?”

“Um, 6.”

“Are you in college yet?” 

“Nope.”

“Lieutenant, I don’t mean to interrupt your breakfast, but can I talk to you for a minute?” 

She wondered if he’d gone to that particular diner knowing that she frequented it. McCoy was either faced with something urgent, or had no sense of social decorum, or both. “I’ll bring Mom right back, Noah,” he promised.

McCoy had avoided talking to Barba as much as he could, Benson noted to herself as she followed him to his booth. “Yes, Mr. McCoy?” she asked, settling into the seat across from his.

“Your department is investigating the adoptions that Judge Marlowe facilitated, correct?”

“What’s this about?”

“Over the summer, I had two ADAs come to me with concerns that one of their colleagues was involved in the adoption of the baby who was killed in Battery Park City last summer.”

“And you didn’t talk to us _then_?”

“After what happened with Rafael, I wanted to be cautious — and certain — before proceeding. EADA Cutter and I have looked into the matter, and we have good reason to believe that Delia Daborne attempted to recruit two of her colleagues into Marlowe’s moneymaking scheme.”

“The other attorneys were either brought in through blackmail or suckered into believing they were helping a charity.”

“Not Daborne. She was in it entirely for the money.”

“With all due respect, Mr. McCoy, you should have brought this up months ago.” If he’d told NYPD what he knew, Carisi and Rollins would have investigated, traced the Battery Park City adoption and the related scam back to Marlowe, which meant that Barba and the rideshare driver would not have been shot, and Rollins would still be on active police duty. It wouldn’t have stopped Langan’s involvement from being exposed, it wouldn’t have stopped the _reason_ for Langan’s involvement from being exposed, but still. _Still._ How many other babies had Daborne given — sold — to parents who couldn’t pass a family court background check? 

“I’m calling my sergeant. He’s the only senior staff I have on duty. Fin Tutuola, one of few people to last more than a decade in SVU. You can count on him. He’ll take your statement, whatever evidence you have, and if we’re able to make an arrest, I’ll come in tonight.”

“Thank you, lieutenant.”

She stepped outside the diner and stood under an awning to protect herself from the snow flurries while she called Fin to coordinate. Afterwards, she returned to the booth with Barba and Noah.

“I may have to go in tonight,” she told Barba. “I promised Lucy the week off so she could work on her thesis, and I feel like I’ve been taking advantage of Amanda, using her as a babysitter so often.”

“I’ll hang out with Noah tonight.”

“Are you sure you’re up for it?”

“Noah and I are friends,” he said, nudging the boy sitting next to him.

“We were friends before you moved away,” Noah said brightly, matter-of-factly, not intending to break anybody’s heart. 

“Ask Mom what you asked me before.”

Noah leaned across the table, gathering a sleeve full of syrup in the process. “Is that man my bi-o-log-i-cal grandfather?” he said, pronouncing each syllable carefully. 

Benson’s face flushed. “No, sweet boy, of course not. Where on earth did you hear that word?”

“They said Grandma Sheila was my biological grandmother.”

“Okay, no, that is Mr. McCoy, who works with me sometimes. He used to be Uncle Rafa’s boss.” She wanted to assure Noah that he didn’t have any more biological relatives out there who might take him away — surely, after Sheila, that’s what he was thinking — but she couldn’t do that honestly. If he found out about Lainey, he wouldn’t trust his mother to protect him from all the people crawling out of the woodwork, like Sheila, wanting to take him away from his home.

“Let’s get the check and go to the park,” Benson said.

“Can I make snowballs?”

“Just don’t throw them at anyone.”

“Even Uncle Rafa?” he said, a grin spreading across his face. 

“Especially Uncle Rafa. He’s still getting better.”

An hour later, Barba and Benson were sitting together on a park bench, watching Noah throw powdery snowballs at a tree and complaining that they fell apart before they even hit the trunk. Benson read a text from Fin: they had an arrest warrant for Delia Daborne. 

_Already?_ she texted back. 

_Already._

“It was a request from the top floor,” Barba said. “McCoy gets what he wants.”

—

Just in time, Barba reminded himself as he sat at Benson’s dining table and opened his laptop, which a paralegal had kindly driven down from Albany when she was visiting family in Brooklyn for Christmas. He opened 15 new Lexis Nexis tabs, all family law articles, and as he read and scribbled notes on the pad next to the laptop, he hoped he’d be in time for Noah, in time to save his adoption from being reviewed in family court, or worse, overturned.

Ten minutes after he started working, he heard whimpers coming from Noah’s room. 

“Noah? Are you feeling all right?” he asked. He approached Noah’s bed tentatively, remembering what the doctors had said: until his lymph nodes fully took over for his spleen, he’d be susceptible to every illness under the sun. 

But he’d made it through the first 72 hours, which meant any illness he contracted would be an inconvenience, not a death sentence. 

He moved in closer. “Noah?”

“Yes. I feel okay.”

Barba sat on the floor next to the bed, not sure how he’d get back to his feet, but that didn’t matter.

“Uncle Rafa?” Noah asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m … a little … scared.”

“Why? Tell me.”

“They’re going to make me live with my biological family instead of my mom.”

“That’s not true. Who told you that?”

“I heard Mom talking on the phone. At night, when she thinks I’m sleeping, sometimes I’m up. And I heard her talking to Mr. Langan yesterday too.”

Barba slumped against the bed. “Of course you did.”

“Are they going to make me live with Grandma Sheila? Or somebody else?”

“No, they won’t do that.”

“But can you stop them from putting my mom in jail? Like how you almost went to jail but didn’t? Can you make sure my mom doesn’t get in trouble?”

Barba swallowed hard. “Listen to me. You are six years old. You don’t have to worry about this.”

“But when Grandma Sheila —“

“You are six years old. Your mom and everyone who loves you, including me, are looking out for you. You don’t have to be scared.”

“But what if my mom goes to jail? You can stop them, right?”

“Noah.” He choked back a few tears when he said the boy’s name. “Your mom and I will not let anything bad happen to you. You are six years old. It’s not on you to have to worry about protecting your mom. Do you want me to stay until you fall asleep?”

“Yes.”

He was glad that he was facing away from the bed, so Noah couldn’t see the hot, silent tears on his cheeks as he assured and reassured him that because he was a child, he didn’t have to worry about protecting his mother. 

As a child, Rafael Barba never had the luxury of that sort of reassurance. 

He leaned back against the bed again and blinked back a few more tears, which fell anyway. Side-effect of the medically-induced coma from three weeks ago, he tried to tell himself. 

“Rafa?”

He woke up to Benson bent down next to him, shaking his shoulder. “It’s two in the morning,” she whispered, helping him to his feet. 

They crossed the hall into Benson’s bedroom. “He’s heard you on the phone at night.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said we’ll make sure nothing happens.”

She touched his cheek, massaging it with her thumb. “You were crying.”

“I told Noah that it’s not on him to have to worry about protecting you.”

She hugged him and rested her chin on his shoulder. “I get that,” she said.

“I’ll go in there blazing, and I won’t shut up until Lainey Gilberti signs away her rights to Noah.”

“You know you can’t —“

“I’ll make sure family court recognizes it’s by far in Noah’s best interest to stay with the only parent he’s ever known. I won’t shut up until —“

“I know, you’re very good at not shutting up.”

He flashed her a tired-but-sarcastic smile. “I need to sleep,” she said. “I haven’t slept in days.”

“All right.”

She got ready for bed and crawled underneath the covers, sliding in next to Barba and resting a hand on his hip. “I get it, I was there too,” she mumbled just before she drifted off.


	13. Chapter 13

Carisi was a 6-foot-tall, 180-something-pound bundle of nerves, pacing the squadroom with his third cup of coffee firmly in hand. Lainey Gilberti was in Interrogation 1 with her new lawyer, a Manhattan-based attorney she’d retained now that Robert Kessilton was back in Albany, in the custody of the state police. He and Mejias, their detective on loan from homicide, had been questioning her for two hours, and she still refused to admit that she’d killed the rideshare driver. 

Carvalho and Sasson were in an interview room with Fin, EADA Cutter and a representative from the Attorney General’s office. The Attorney General was mainly interested in the connection between Marlowe the ride share app; the Manhattan DA wanted the names of all the other local attorneys involved in the adoption scam. In exchange, they were going to plead Carvalho out on 3-5 years probation.

It was the best they could do: if the fraud charges against Carvalho didn’t stick, all the information that he gave them would be considered inadmissible because of attorney-client privilege. The fate of his career was now in the hands of the ABA and the New York State Bar Association. 

Benson, meanwhile, had just wrapped up her interrogation of Delia Daborne, the ADA accused of enthusiastically participating in Marlowe’s scam. Daborne was heading to arraignment court in the custody of two officers, and would likely very soon face a civil suit from the 16-year-old biological mother of the infant who’d died in Battery Park City. But before Benson could venture to breathe all the way out, she spotted Barba heading down the hallway, accompanied by family court corporate counsel Pippa Cox. 

Pippa Cox was the last person she wanted to see. 

“Counselor,” Barba said, “there is no need for you to be here. Mr. Langan is still talking to the DA.”

“Lieutenant Benson,” Cox said, ignoring Barba, “I am here representing the city. First off, I want to assure you that we’re aware it’s in Noah’s best interest to stay with you for the time being. However, my office has asked family court to vacate the adoption, and family court has agreed to do so. Can we talk in your office?”

“We can talk right here. And don’t you dare tell me about what’s in Noah’s best interest.”

Barba reflexively put an arm around Benson’s waist, then quickly withdrew it. “In the absence of fraud, Ms. Cox, no finalized adoption can be overturned.”

“We’ve got a triple whammy here: the birth father was still living when the adoption was being finalized —“

“His birth father would have trafficked him!” Benson said, practically spitting the words out. 

“There were at least two living relatives, Sheila Porter and Lainey Gilberti, which means that Trevor Langan did not perform a good-faith investigation. That constitutes fraud.”

“We’re moving to appeal this decision _now_ ,” Barba said. 

“She can reapply to adopt Noah, provided that there are no other living relatives, we can confirm that Ms. Porter signed away her rights to her grandson without coercion, and that Ms. Gilberti signs away her rights to Noah without coercion as well.”

As they headed towards Interrogation 1, where Carisi had finished questioning Lainey for the moment, Barba made quick demands of the corporate counsel: “Noah is not to know anything about what’s happening, are we clear, counselor? You are charged with acting in the best interest of the child, and it’s in the child’s best interest that he doesn’t find out that your court has decided that his mother is legally no longer his mother.”

“I’ll send you the paperwork and arrange for you to appear before a judge.” 

Cox disappeared down the hall. Benson’s hands and teeth were clenched. 

“Lainey’s going to prison anyway,” Barba tried to reassure Benson. “She’s already confessed. Cutter will get her to take a plea deal.”

“How many more living relatives must Noah have?”

“Maybe none.” He moved in closer. “Are you sure you want to go in there this outraged?”

“I _need_ to go in there this outraged.”

“Don’t mention Noah unless she brings him up first,” Barba warned.

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

“That’s legal advice. I’m representing Noah.”

“Fine. Come on.”

“Deep breath.”

“I’ve been a detective for 22 years. I know what I’m doing.” Benson opened the door to the interrogation room, where Lainey and her lawyer sat waiting at the far end of the table.

“How’s my nephew?” were the first words out of Lainey’s mouth. 

“Thank you for immediately opening that door, Ms. Gilberti,” Barba said, easing himself into a chair opposite Lainey’s lawyer, whose eyes were now wide with frustration. 

Benson stared across the table. “Tell me something that won’t get you 20 years added on for the rideshare driver.”

“I’ve been over this with Detective Carisi a million times already. It was Marlowe. I swear to God it was Marlowe. And I know what you’re trying to do here. Criminal conspiracy’s 3 to 5 years if there’s no murder. Add grand theft auto and assaulting a police officer to that, I’m getting 8 to 10. You don’t think I know what’s going on? I see right through you, Lieutenant. You’ve got everybody working for you trying to get me on the driver so I don’t get out before my nephew turns 18. Good luck with the DA on that one.”

“Good luck with the DA,” Benson echoed, “when he finds out you’re leveraging my son to get out of a murder rap.”

Lainey’s lawyer demanded to see Detective Mejias. “Why aren’t we sitting down with the homicide detective when what you’re accusing my client of is a homicide? This certainly reads like a vendetta on Lieutenant Benson’s part.”

“I’ll get her,” Benson said flatly. 

“Can I talk to the lieutenant alone a minute?” Lainey asked.

“Not advisable,” her lawyer said.

Barba looked worried.

“Yes,” Benson said.

“Liv,” Barba started to say, pushing his chair away from the table.

“I know what I’m doing.”

“If —“

“Keep the two-way mirror and the speakers off, all right?”

“All right.” 

Benson tilted her head in the direction of the security camera, signaling to Barba that her officers would be able to observe her. 

As soon as they were alone, Lainey stood up and pressed her palms flat against the table. “I swear to God I never killed anybody with my own hands except Marlowe, and that was self-defense. He was mad because I stole the ambulance and called too much attention to what was going on. He was going to kill me and tell you guys that I shot the driver who was supposed to kill Andy Carvalho, I swear.”

“You know we’ve already got you on criminal conspiracy for the scam. This means homicide’s got you on conspiracy to commit murder, too.”

“Yeah, and my lawyer’s working on concurrent sentences. I’m going to jail, I get it. I served a couple months a long time ago, jail’s a family tradition.”

At that, Benson shut her eyes. “Just tell me,” she said, her voice raspy with sleeplessness and worry, “tell me my son has no other living relatives.”

“Not on my side he doesn’t. Your guys killed Johnny — God forgive me, but I’m not complaining — his dad died in jail before I was even born, and my mom and dad are both gone ten years. My dad’s got some second cousins still around, and a sister, but since Johnny and I only had the same mom, my dad’s family isn’t blood-related to the kid. Your buddy Langan had to have known I existed, though.”

“Congratulations, Lainey, you got my son taken away from me.”

A look of surprise and actual concern washed over Lainey’s face. “Who’s he going with?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Benson said, deciding that a half-truth might allow her to work with Lainey’s concerns about Noah. 

“What the fuck? You’re his mother.” There it was: Lainey’s slip revealed that perhaps she was using the circumstances of Noah’s adoption as nothing more than leverage against her, just as she’d done with Langan. 

“I am.”

“I — all right, look, you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t shoot the driver. I’ll go to trial for that if I have to, I won’t cop to something I didn’t do. I’ll sign away my rights to your son.”

“The family court judge will say that you signed away your rights to Noah in exchange for us dropping murder charges against you.”

“I never meant for it to go so far where you actually lost custody,” Lainey said. “It was just threats, like with Langan. I tell you about the kid, you do whatever I say, everything stays the same.”

Benson sat a few inches from the table, her arms folded. 

“I’ll go to family court myself if I have to,” Lainey continued. “I don’t want that kid ever knowing where he came from. Does he know about Johnny?”

“Not yet.”

“Don’t tell him he’s Johnny’s. When I was 3, my parents got divorced and there was a whole custody battle over me because my dad didn’t want me living in the same house with Johnny. Johnny was only 12 and already threatened to kill me a bunch of times. The judges all sided with my mother because my dad was known criminal — my mom ran card games for the boys in Howard Beach, but my dad’s name was on all the FBI charts — so my mom got custody, even though my dad was scared for my life. You know what it took for a guy who was wanted by the FBI to go through the courts like that? That kid has to stay with you and never ever know who his birth father was, you got me?”

Benson nodded at Lainey. “I’ve worked in special victims for twenty-one years. I got you.”

“Enough of that. Just don’t tell your kid anything about Johnny. That lawyer you’re with, he’s a good guy?”

“Very good,” Benson said.

“You trust him a hundred percent?”

“I do.”

“Then tell Noah he’s his father and forget Johnny, wipe him off the face of the earth.”

Of course she wouldn’t — couldn’t — tell Noah that Barba was his father for myriad reasons, including Noah’s ability to see through an obvious lie. In that moment, Benson was sure that Lainey, who was a car thief, criminal conspiracist, and blackmailer, was telling the truth. 

She’d explain that to Barba when they strategized later that night, in the bedroom with the door closed after triple-checking that Noah was asleep. 

—

They spent New Year’s Eve together, just the three of them. Noah stayed up to watch the ball drop on tv at midnight and was so overtired that he wasn’t able to fall asleep until after two in the morning. 

Benson hadn’t slept for more than three hours straight since Lainey revealed her connection to Langan. That night, she didn’t sleep at all. Barba, still drowsy as he recovered from his gunshot wound and subsequent six-hour surgery, forced himself to stay awake all night with her. 

On New Year’s Day, they had brunch at Lucia’s, with her and Andy Carvalho. When they told Lucia that Noah’s adoption was being overturned, she cried. 

(Barba would admit later that night that Lucia had pulled him aside and told him _you’d better fix this, you’d better fix this for Olivia and Noah, after what you did to Olivia last year_ and that the adoption might not have been overturned if he’d just had the courage to stay in New York City after his trial. _Enough guilt_ , Benson would say, _enough, enough, enough. Move forward._ )

“We’re putting the entire Harvard Law class of ’95 on it,” Carvalho promised. ”I took my personal beef with Kessilton too far, and we wound up here.”

“The stealing-cars-for-Yelp-reviews was more than a personal beef,” Benson assured him. “And Langan’s involvement, Lainey’s connection to Noah, would have come out eventually anyway.”

“I’m still beating myself up over this, Olivia.”

“When are you heading back to Albany?” Barba asked Carvalho, changing the subject when Noah returned from the bathroom.

“Thursday.”

“Can I hitch a ride?”

“As long as you don’t complain if I take the Taconic.”

“You’re going away again?” Noah asked, approaching Barba at the table.

“You’ll see him again in two weeks,” Benson said. In two weeks, they had a hearing in family court. Benson had already requested that Noah not be involved; it was not in his best interest to know that the adoption had been overturned. She hoped the judge would continue to honor that request. 

“Noah, come here,” Barba said, drawing the boy into a hug. “I have to finish all my work in Albany first, but I’ll see you in two weeks, and I’m going to find a new job here. By fall, I’ll be back in the city for good.”

Carvalho let out a “hm.”

“What?”

“Side of Rafael Barba I never thought I’d see. I owe Rita ten bucks.”

“You don’t have a court date here until next month, Andy. How come you stayed through New Year’s?”

“In case NYPD or the DAs office needed me.”

“I thought your fraud case was being handled by the Attorney General.”

Carvalho shot him a look. 

“I guess NYPD really needed you on New Year’s Eve,” Barba said. 

“Olivia, don’t worry, I’ll make sure to get Rafael fired, or steal his clients, so he has no choice but to come back.”

Barba reached across the table for Benson’s hand. “I’m coming back,” he assured her. “However much of a fool I was for leaving —“

Behind him, Carvalho mouthed the word “fool” and nodded in agreement. 

“I’m coming back, and I’m staying in your life. That’s a promise.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for your encouragement on this one. These last three fics were my first in a very, very long time, and with "Cantilever" I tried out a few things I've never done in fanfic before (lots of OCs, OC development, heavy emotional plot, weirdly plotted mystery, smuttish scenes, and so on). I've been pleasantly surprised by all the positive feedback.
> 
> IT IS DONE. Almost 30k words? I am tired. ;-)

At the hearing two weeks into the new year, family court Judge Shira Suarez sided with corporate counsel’s decision to vacate Noah’s adoption. In the 1990s, she argued, too many adoptions of the children of drug addicts had gone through the system under fraudulent circumstances. Although this situation was admittedly different, not vacating the adoption would look bad on the part of the city and the court. 

Barba, furious, told Judge Suarez that she was potentially destroying a family for the sake of optics, and that Pippa Cox ought to recuse herself, since the possibility that she was out for revenge on Benson and Barba for imprisoning her ex-husband didn’t look so good either. Barba was very nearly held in contempt of court that morning.

Cox and Judge Suarez told Benson to re-file immediately, and that pending a thorough investigation of whether Noah had any more living relatives, and sufficient evidence that Sheila Porter and Lainey Gilberti had signed away their rights to Noah without coercion, the adoption and Benson’s legal status as Noah’s mother would be restored without further questioning. 

Meanwhile, in state supreme court, a judge accepted the Attorney General’s plea deal for Lainey: 8 to 10 years on criminal conspiracy, grand theft auto, and assaulting a police officer. For Benson, anything less than 12 years — anything less than Noah’s 18th birthday — wasn’t enough. But, if Lainey really hadn’t killed the rideshare driver, as she’d never stopped insisting, anything more than 10 years would have been unjust. Benson understood that.

Two months to the day after Barba was shot and left for dead by an amateur, inexperienced hitman hired by a corrupt judge to kill Andy Carvalho, he stood with Benson on the steps outside family court, waiting for the doors to open so they could proceed past security and into the courtroom, where they hoped Judge Suarez would affirm that Benson was unequivocally, irrevocably Noah’s mother. The last three weeks had been tense; Benson still couldn’t sleep more than two or three hours at a time. Barba came down to Manhattan every Friday night and stayed until Sunday afternoon. 

Outside the courthouse, Barba squeezed Benson’s hand. “You changed my life, you know that?” he said, squinting into the cold air. “You changed my life, and I won’t let you down.”

They walked through the heavy doors, through the metal detectors and past the security guard, and finally into a courtroom at the end of the first floor hall. Cox and Judge Suarez joined them five minutes later. 

Their three-week investigation, Cox told them, had turned up no living relatives other than Sheila Porter and Lainey Gilberti, who had both, to the satisfaction of corporate counsel and the court, signed away their rights to Noah of their own volition, without coercion. Though Langan might lose his law license, the court was restoring the adoption. 

Noah was Benson’s son for good, for certain, forever. She had at least that much. A win, after six weeks of worry, six weeks of fear that her heart would be torn still beating from her ribcage, but a win nevertheless. 

When it was over, Benson embraced Barba in the courtroom’s gallery. 

They went to their favorite diner that night to celebrate. Noah still had no idea that for six weeks, Benson wasn’t legally his mother. She’d talk to him about it one day when he was older, old enough to feel secure, protected in spite of that knowledge. So, when Barba raised a glass of ice water and said, “We are celebrating something very special tonight,” Benson shot him a half-confused, half-annoyed look. 

“We are celebrating because I got a new job.”

_What?_ Benson mouthed.

“Assistant Professor of Law at Fordham University. I’ll be up for tenure at the end of a three-year appointment. That means,” he said, looking across the table at Noah, “I’m moving back to New York City in June.”

“We are definitely celebrating, then,” Benson said, clinking her water glass with his and Noah’s. 

They’d open up a bottle of red wine later that night, and celebrate, and both sleep soundly for the first time in months. 

—

On a Saturday evening in early December, incidentally the first anniversary of Barba’s near-death under the Queensborough Bridge, Benson sat in her living room with Amanda Rollins, the first person to leave SVU without completely disappearing from her life (she’d been transferred to forensics in March after the pin in her hand was successfully removed) and Fin Tutuola, who’d refused to leave her even when a promotion was supposed to send him elsewhere. Barba, who’d been living with her and Noah since he moved back to the city in June, was unpacking a delivery from the Italian restaurant three blocks up. He’d kept his promise and was back for good, wrapping up his first semester as a law professor. 

Benson’s friends and colleagues (almost one and the same these last few years) had insisted on celebrating her most recent promotion: Captain Olivia Benson was now heading up the entire 16th Precinct. 

Barba opened the door to retired sergeant John Munch, with Carisi and Carvalho trailing not far behind him. “Rafael Barba,” Munch said, shaking his hand, “I hear you’ve got a tenure track professorship and you’re living with Olivia Benson. Let me congratulate you on being the luckiest person in the world.”

“Hey there, stranger,” Benson said, embracing Munch when he came through the living room. 

“Captain Benson. Always knew the day would come.”

“I told Dodds I’d give him three years, help him get the whole 16th in line, and then I’m done.”

“Three years, sure, that’s what I told my supervisors every three years during my last 15 years on the job.”

Benson made a face at Munch as she went to greet Carvalho. “I heard you’re moving to New York soon yourself,” she said. “You and Rita Calhoun are starting your own firm?”

“We’re recruiting attorneys. I’m only able to be in a consulting position for two years because I’m not allowed to practice in a courtroom until my probation is over. Could have been much worse, though. I’m lucky.”

“Carvalho and Calhoun,” Barba said from the kitchen, “God help the DAs office.”

“Calhoun and Carvalho,” he corrected. “Alphabetical.”

“In case you’re interested in buying a co-op, putting down permanent roots here, Apartment 10H is for sale,” Benson offered. 

Carisi, who’d been standing behind her, patted Benson on the shoulder. “You’re very subtle, Captain.”

“Very.”

Something crashed to the floor in Noah’s room. “Was that a toy or a person?” Rollins shouted. 

“Toy!” Noah answered. 

“Toy!” Jesse echoed.

“Rafa, can I —“ Benson started to say.

“Go ahead,” Barba said, nodding in Benson’s direction. 

Benson settled into the recliner and Barba sat with her, on the armrest. “So,” Benson continued, “Rafael has petitioned to adopt Noah. Any letters of support are welcome. Not necessary, but very much welcome.”

“I’ll write a letter,” Rollins said. “I can say something nice about Rafael Barba for Noah’s sake.” 

From his spot on the armrest, Barba, with a big smile on his face, flipped Rollins off. 

“You’ve still got a long way before you get back in my good graces,” Rollins said. “Just because you lost a couple of vital organs, that doesn’t mean anything.”

“He’s back. Give him a break,” Carisi told Rollins. 

From the couch, Fin was shaking his head _no_. 

“The judges are still old-fashioned about this kind of adoption,” Carisi said. “The court might give you a hard time about not being married.”

“We really should do that one of these days, Liv,” Barba said, reaching for her hand, linking his fingers with hers.

“Some day,” she said, feigning a sigh, “some day.”

The two current detectives, one retired detective, one former detective who was now an NYPD forensics specialist, and defense attorney in the room looked at each other and then at Benson and Barba. 

“When?” Fin asked.

“Six weeks ago, on Rafael’s birthday.”

Rollins and Carisi high-fived.

“What was that?” Benson asked.

“Four or five years ago, Carisi and I said that if you ever got married, you wouldn’t tell anyone. You’d show up at work the next day like nothing had happened, or you’d come back married from a vacation and wouldn’t tell any of us.”

“Congratulations,” Carvalho said. “I don’t know how I feel about my friend of 27 years keeping this a secret from me, but I’ll take comfort in the fact that Rita’s going to smack you upside the head when she finds out you didn’t tell her either.” 

Carvalho went to the kitchen counter and poured a few glasses of wine, raising one in Benson and Barba’s direction. “To Rafael and Olivia, the happy couple, who saved my life in more ways than one. Saúde, salud, and lots of it.” 

Carisi leapt up and grabbed a glass. “Here here.” He downed half the wine and snaked an arm around Carvalho’s waist. “10H is a no-go, though. I’m not living above my boss.”

“It’s six floors up, you won’t even know I’m here,” Benson said, laughing. When Carvalho went back to the kitchen counter to pour more wine, Benson stood up and threw her arms around Carisi.

A year ago, before Fin had called to tell her that Barba was fighting for his life at Mercy, Benson was ready to retire, maybe leave New York City just like Barba had, because her life had become too exhaustingly episodic. Everything awful that had happened to her — once-hopeful relationships ending in forehead kisses, friends from SVU and the DAs office moving on with their lives and completely disappearing from hers, walking into traps, getting caught in hostage situations, almost losing Noah — always happened two, three, four times, as if once wasn’t enough. 

For a time, she’d felt like she was stuck standing alone in the cold on Centre Street, glued to the pavement while everyone she loved, everyone who she’d allegedly changed for the better, picked up and left. The same scene, over and over and over again. 

Stabler, Cabot, and Tucker were surely all lost causes, but Fin had chosen to stay, and Rollins had left SVU but remained a welcome presence in her life, both of them breaking the cycle for once. 

And Barba (her husband, her partner, her spouse: all those terms still seemed bizarre in her mind when applied to him) had walked away because he needed to re-orient his moral compass. When he did, it pointed right back to Olivia Benson.

**Author's Note:**

> So, this one: I started this before "Comeback" but the plot was so convoluted that I couldn't figure out what to do with it. I've decided in my (complete lack of) spare time to make it happen.
> 
> Barson eventually. If you read this, I owe you a cute, happy Barson scene from the "Comeback" universe where, like, nothing terrible's happened to them for two years.
> 
> Remind me that I'm not allowed to catch feelings about fictional characters anymore.


End file.
